Its true for every browser except Tor.
I think Firefox uses DoH by default in certain places
Hey there, I have been lately trying to better understand how privacy/my network work lately. I’m kind of right at that line where the next barrier gets pretty technical. I think I have a decent understanding of DoH, but I know it has quite click for me yet. How would you describe it? (I’m assuming that is an acronym for DNS over HTTP?)
Yes, or more precisely it’s DNS over HTTPS.
The S at the end stand for Secure, but technically it means that it is HTTP inside TLS. TLS encrypts the traffic, and verifies server responses to be authentic.
HTTP and HTTPS are most often used by websites, but there are many more common uses of it.When a program - like firefox - uses DoH to resolve domain names (that is, find their corresponding IP address, they can have multiple), then instead of asking the DNS server that was configured in the operating system (often automatically set by your router’s “advisory”, though DHCP) through a clear text channel that is prone to inspection and manipulation, instead of that it asks a DNS server that communicates over HTTPS, just like webservers do.
By doing this, domain name lookups have the protection of TLS, and they look like as if you have just visited a website. It’s harder* to find out which server was that request sent to, what was the purpose of that request, and since the content of the request is encrypted, and the response is encrypted and signed just as when visiting a website, it’s harder to see as an outside observer what was being done, including what website’s IP did you look up, and it’s harder for them to modify this response.DoH servers to be used may be set up with an IP address if that is fix and never changes, or through a domain name. If you only have the domain name of a DoH server, then you can’t contact that yet, first you have to look up it’s IP address using either an other DoH server who’s address is fix or the current one is known, or with a plain DNS server.
This is really helpful thank you. Definitely somewhere between “I kind of get it” and “I understand some of these words,” but I think with a little term research and some pondering this will click better. Appreciate your taking the time to break it down!
The ISP can see every domain, but not every page. That’s what HTTPS everywhere was all about.
And hopefully in the future they won’t even he able to see the domain. I wonder why they never considered giving out certificates for IPs to solve this problem. Seemed like the easiest solution to me.
SNI says no.
ECH/ESNI says yes
They need the IP address to know where to forward the packet to. Hard to avoid that without VPN or TOR.
There was a demo for a technology put out recently that circumvents this. I don’t remember the exact mechanisms, but it obscured DNS such that your ISP couldn’t see the DNS record you requested, and then used a proxy to route traffic before it hit the final endpoint eliminating exposing the IP to your ISP. It worked very similar to a VPN, but without the encrypted connection, and had some speed focused optimizations including the proxy being proximate to your ISP. It was pretty interesting.
It doesn’t really help. The ISP needs to route you somewhere to get the data, so they’ll need to know who you want to talk to. Even if they don’t see the DNS name (like if you used a third party DNS server) they can still associate the IP address with someone.
There’s things like TOR and VPNs that can route your information through other third parties first, but that impacts performance pretty significantly.
Depending on where you’re going even IP addresses are getting to the point that they aren’t helpful. IP addresses are likely to belong to a cloud provider, and unless they are hosting email or a service that requires a reverse record, all you’d get is the cloud provider’s information.
Yeah, but often enough multiple sites share a single IP. It would already be better if the ISP (and everyone in between) didn’t know whether I wanted pink-fluffy-unicorns.com or hardcore-midget-bdsm.com.
They can see the entire URL, not just the domain. They just can’t see the contents themselves. But they can still see “dudesfuckingfurniture.com/gettingfreakywithadresser.mpeg”
The example link doesn’t work :'(
I was ready to go down a rabbit hole there
Are you sure? The file path after the domain would not be necessary for an ISP to see, only the domain. I’m not sure how all that works, but it’s definitely not a technical requirement thay they can see the complete URL.
After more research, you might be right. I could have sworn I saw full URLs in my router logs on encrypted sites though. I’ll have to check again.
It’s actually more secure than that.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/https-protect/
They’d see the URL, but not the specific page.
They’d also theoretically see the size of the URL, and the size of the page, along with the transport type. So they can infer a lot of information from the exchange, but they couldn’t say for sure what you were viewing on a specific website.
When it comes to HTTPS, this is just plain wrong on a technical level.
I’m not sure if that’s a real website. I’m not checking.
Narrator : Vej definitely did in fact check.
As always on the Internet, rule 34 applies.
The fact anyone ever thought this was for any reason other than making it easier to hide your porn browsing history from your mom is just silly.
That and" stalking" people on LinkedIn
Also it’s for loading web pages that don’t behave well otherwise
That’s pretty much all I use it for. To keep my porn browsing off of my history.
Not to hide it from anyone, I don’t live with my mother anymore and I don’t think my SO would care. More so that when I google something, I don’t get porn auto complete entries in my everyday browsing.
I’m fully aware that my traffic is able to be monitored by my ISP (at least to the extent that there’s a connection that exists. HTTPS is still not capable of being easily decrypted), and my DNS is resolving the address for the porn sites, and that Google (or whatever search engine) is logging that the search happened… Or that the sites see my connection, from my IP, and know what I watched.
My only objective is that they can’t link that to my normal browsing or accounts.
You know all those “share on”… Twitter/Facebook/whatever links? When they load, from Facebook, it asks the referer URL, and checks the browser for any cookies that might associate that browsing to a person for ad customization. Incognito isolates that information, so while Facebook/X(Twitter)/whoever may know that someone went to that URL, they have no cookie data to link it to a person uniquely, so they have information that the site was visited, but no idea who visited the site since any session cookies I have for those services are in my non-incognito browser.
You know all those “share on”… Twitter/Facebook/whatever links? When they load, from Facebook, it asks the referer URL, and checks the browser for any cookies that might associate that browsing to a person for ad customization. Incognito isolates that information, so while Facebook/X(Twitter)/whoever may know that someone went to that URL, they have no cookie data to link it to a person uniquely, so they have information that the site was visited, but no idea who visited the site since any session cookies I have for those services are in my non-incognito browser.
I mean, this is a little outdated by today’s practices. Any ad tracker worth their salt will be using browser fingerprinting as well.
Imagine this scenario: You have a user with a specific browser, with specific extensions installed, (which you can derive from the fact that your ads are getting blocked by a specific ad blocker, they have the “Do Not Track” flag enabled, you have a nice monitor with a large aspect ratio and you’re browsing in full screen so the site can see that aspect ratio, etc…) from a specific IP address. In normal browsing, this user has a tracking cookie so your “share on Facebook” buttons can see what sites they’re visiting.
But now you’re seeing an identical browser, with identical extensions, on an identical IP address. But this time it doesn’t have your tracking cookie. Sure, there’s the chance that two people are using identical settings. But as your extension list grows and your browser becomes more unique, your fingerprint becomes more easily identifiable. So now, even without that tracking cookie, they’re able to use that fingerprint to infer that you’re the same person and link your incognito browsing back to your regular browsing.
This and avoiding that pages, which you don’t use daily, fill your HD and browser with all kind of crap you don’t need and want.
I use it to browse products and content that I dont want in my ad profiles. Like, sometimes I’d like to take a look at what my resident right wing nut case posted, but without having the ad brokers think that I need an AR15 and a Trump bible.
Removed by mod
Also VPNs see everything you do, but please, again, enlighten me how paying some OTHER corporation somehow better protects me from corporations?
It protects you only if you have chosen the right VPN provider.
Of course if you choose some random VPN that was advertised in a youtube video that may as well be a downgrade depending on what your ISP does with your data already.
But if you choose a honest VPN provider, who’s values aligns with yours, and does not share (neither collect) any data on your usage and traffic, then that can easily be better.Also keep in mind that ISP’s often operate knowing that they are the only provider in the area. Or the only usable one, or that the others aren’t better either. There’s no competition, and they make use of the fact that they can do whatever they want that is legal (a lot of things is), because the user can’t just switch to another that does not do it.
However, there’s a competition between VPNs. Unfortunately most of that competition is driven by lies, but fortunately not all of it is.Set https everywhere. Use secure DNS servers. Install TOR along with all that. Tell me how your VPN provider can “see everything you do” with many layers of encryption, decentralization, and propagation of your data?
different vpns will have different use cases.
some people just want to bypass geolocked content, this only requires having a vpn in whatever region you want content in.
those who only care about piracy and avoiding dmca claims, they need a VPN who do not keep logs. or is hosted in a country that does not respond to DMCA requests
those who need a VPN for privacy reasons, theres tiers of it. basically some people will refuse to use VPNs hosted in Five Eyes/Nine Eyes countries as the government would likely know your actions. some people dont care of government knows, others do.
A VPN isn’t magically solving all privacy and security issues. Personally, I would trust Mullvad, Proton and IVPN with my data over my ISP. They’ve been audited, and they’ve been put to test multiple times, and not been able to give away data. But it all really boils down to personal needs, and each to their own on that. If you don’t want a VPN, then don’t buy into one.
Encrypted DNS anyone? (NextDNS for example)
That solves a completely different problem. The ISP can still see who you requested data from.
That’s more about security around retrieving the correct IP address from a DNS query, and doesn’t do that much for privacy.
DoT also encrypts the request, so the ISP cannot spy on the Domain Name you have requested.
And thanks to Https the ISP only sees the IP address which cannot in every case be resolved to a unique Domain, especially large sites that are hosted on service providers like Cloudflare, amazon etc etc
But what’s not encrypted by either is the Server Name Indicator or SNI, ie: the initial request to a webserver stating which host you’re trying to reach at that IP, before establishing the TLS connection, contains the domain you’d requested via DoH/DoT, in plaintext.
encrypted SNI is a thing now.
True. Known as Encrypted Client Hello now, as part of TLS1.3.
It seems many more browsers support it than last I’d looked. I’m curious to see how much of the general web has adopted support for it onnthe server side. I’ll have to look into that more, and see what it’ll take to setup for self-hosting.
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/dns-over-tls/
If I understand it correctly DoH (which I use with NextDNS) should prevent ISP from snooping.
The one word more people need to know about: threatmodel
deleted by creator
So your threat model assumes an actor with a quantum computer capable of breaking RSA, but not a regular computer capable of filtering by IP address?
deleted by creator
A VPN is only a single end point just like your ISP meaning you are only shifting the problem to your VPN provider who admittedly is more trustworthy than your ISP but you are still putting an immense amount of trust into a single point of failure.
If you truly want to hide from your ISP or really anyone, your only options are to use TOR or I2P where your traffic is encrypted and tumbled through multiple servers.
Assuming you’re using https, your ISP cannot see what pages you visit. It can only see what website you access (IP address).
If you use DNS of TLS. Otherwise, they can see you resolve those addresses.
Even that isn’t enough, because of the SNI, right? One would need to also use encrypted SNI.
The typical default configuration has the ISP providing DNS services (and even if you use an external DNS provider, the default configuration there is that the DNS traffic itself isn’t encrypted from the ISP’s ability to analyze).
So even if you visit a site that is hosted on some big service, where the IP address might not reveal what you’re looking at (like visiting a site hosted or cached by Cloudflare or AWS), the DNS lookup might at least reveal the domain you’re visiting.
Still, the domain itself doesn’t reveal the URL that follows the domain.
So if you do a Google search for “weird sexual fetishes,” that might cause you to visit the URL:
https://www.google.com/search?q=weird+sexual+fetishesYour ISP can see that you visited the
www.google.comdomain, but can’t see what search you actually performed.There are different tricks and tips for keeping certain things private from certain observers, so splitting up the actual ISP from the DNS resolver from the website itself might be helpful and scattering pieces of information, but some of those pieces of information will inevitably have to be shared with someone.
I always thought private browsing was just so all the porn content doesn’t stay in search history’s and the address bar doesn’t auto fill fatasshonkeybabes.com if my grandmother sits down to look at her Facebooks.
Why are you hogging all the hot singles in your area to yourself? Sharing is caring!
Private browsing in Google Chrome will not store your browsing data locally into your computer; but Google will still keep that data in their own records.
That is exactly what it is.
And it was always clearly stated as such. It’s absurd that anyone was upset by this. I have yet to find a single user on here who did not properly understand what it was for, or at least none willing admit to being that dumb.
Everybody knows the deal. We just like to keep joking about it, as we see above in the OP meme.
You’ve yet to find a user on here, Lemmy, an obscure obfuscates fediverse that is mostly a refuge for very technical people unhappy on Reddit.
I haven’t even found a user that didn’t have a very personal opinion on Linux.
Now try to say the same thing about Facebook.
I’ve never used Linux and don’t even understand it so that last part’s not quite true anymore.
Very non tech savvy person here, that is just a normie reddit refugee. I know what Linux is, but have never really worked with it. Don’t have an opinion about it. I recently installed a pi hole in my home network by following step by step instructions. That’s the most techy stuff I ever did in my life and I would have never dared to try it, if I hadn’t read a comment on lemmy that linked an easy introduction into working with raspberry pis.
Can a fellow non tech savvy person get that link please?
Most non-technical person would think a pi-hole is probably another word for whatever the fuck a Bussy is.
Have you tried because of lemmy? Or was it something you flirted with before. Because your post do scream im secretly a technical person
I saw a lot of normal people who just didnt want reddit anymore. So here are a lot of non tech savy people too without even knowinng Linux.
I saw a lot of normal people who just didnt want reddit anymore. So here are a lot of non tech savy people too without even knowinng Linux.
Only in Chrome? In every browser using private mode, private mode only delete the local storage (wbSQL, Serviceworkers, cookies, cache, etc), no other things, it hide nothing, for webpages which log you (or the search engine you use, AI and some other extensions which you use in "private"mode) it’s irrelevant if you use private or normal mode. It’s a very frecuent missconcept to believe that the private mode is the same as anonym browsing, simple extensions, like Cookie Autodelete or SiteBleacher do exactly the same as browsing in private mode, but with the feature that you can partial or full whitelist the pages where private mode isn’t needed.
More or less Private only if you use VPN, SPN, MPR, Snowflake or at least a proxie.
I only mentioned chrome due to the recent shenanigans with their “incognito mode”.
Well, all browser have incognito or private mode, it’s nothing special. Vivaldi in this moment has released in the last snapshot an inbuild MPR in test, this will be a real private incognito mode.
As someone who hosts my own dns server I can confirm that I can see everything that is accessed but the not the whole url, I can see the base url like if you access YouTube, I’ll see that you pinged YouTube.com, what you received exactly I don’t know but I can tell that you went on YouTube.
Try hosting a firewall.
At a minimum this meme maker has no idea how TLS, browsers, cookies, or DNS work.
TLS doesn’t encrypt the host name of the urls you are visiting and DNS traffic is insanely easy to sniff even if you aren’t using your ISPs service.
Yeah, my point exactly.
Um, if you use their DNS they do. Some ISPs force that in fact.
Never had an ISP firewall my DNS. Not sure what country you live in, but it sounds like China at that rate.
It’s usually ISP specific.
Some ISPs in the USA and Germany have been doing it. This is why DNS over HTTPs exists to bypass those blocks.
I always thought they exist because privacy. Regular old DNS requests are not encrypted so even if you send a request to 9.9.9.9 your ISP can still see it.
No, a lot will default to that, but they can’t force you to use any particular dns server. I mean they can, buts a fcc violation at that point I believe
It became legal when the Trump administration got rid of net neutrality legislation.
This is why it is so important to get it back, but the current administration is dragging their feet.
…no, it didn’t. IPs can’t just block access to specific dns servers Willy nilly. They can slow down specific dns servers of their choice but there’s literally no incentive to do so. Your individual dns traffic isn’t that important I promise.
They do worse than block it, the redirect it to their own servers.
And the data is worth it at volume. They have hundreds of thousands of users, along with the region they are in, as well as data on what websites they visit.
Advertisers have and continue to pay for that data.
How can the ISP force their dns? They can’t know where you got the destination ip from.
They could technically just drop and traffic over port 53 that is not destined to their own DNS servers. But that’s china level shit. I’ve never seen an ISP control this in North America.
They can also redirect that traffic to their own DNS servers, so you think you are using 3rd party DNS, when you are actually still using theirs. This became legal when the Trump administration got rid of net neutrality legislation.
OpenDNS has an article on how to test if your ISP is doing it. https://support.opendns.com/hc/en-us/articles/227988727-How-can-I-tell-if-my-ISP-Allows-Third-Party-DNS-Providers
That is where DNS over TLS and DNS over HTTPS come in. 🙂
Yes of course.
So you think people should assume they have absolute privacy because of the word “incognito”?
The joke says the opposite. He’s not hidden at all.
The joke is making fun of anyone who does assume incognito mode is hiding anything from third parties.
All the Chrome bashing around this issue is pathetic. Every major browser has the same feature and none that I know of give it a name that makes the purpose any more clear. It’s obvious a lot of people have an irrational hatred of Chrome and don’t understand the actual issues involved.
Replace ISP with VPN, if you use them.
