



Network Working Group                                      M. Nottingham
Internet-Draft                                             June 29, 2019
Intended status: Informational
Expires: December 31, 2019


                              DOH Digests
                    draft-nottingham-doh-digests-00

Abstract

   The lack of flexible configuration and selection mechanisms for DOH
   servers is identified as suboptimal for privacy and performance in
   some applications.

   This document makes a straw-man proposal for an improvement.

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   This Internet-Draft will expire on December 31, 2019.

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Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
     1.1.  DOH's Additional Benefits for Associated Services . . . .   2
     1.2.  Achieving DOH's Privacy Goals through Diversity . . . . .   3
   2.  Conventions and Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   3.  DOH Digests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.1.  Using DOH Digests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.2.  The DOH Digest Format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     3.3.  Hostname Normalisation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   4.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   5.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   6.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     6.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     6.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6

1.  Introduction

   One of the core motivations for DOH [I-D.ietf-doh-dns-over-https] is
   to improve end-user privacy by obfuscating the stream of DNS requests
   that the DOH client makes.  It does this by mixing DOH requests into
   a stream of "normal" HTTP requests to a configured Web server; for
   example, a large Web site or a Content Delivery Network.

   However, DOH intentionally avoids defining a mechanism for
   configuring a particular DOH server for a given application or host.
   So far, the most common way to do so is to select one from a pre-
   configured list of services in an application, such as a Web browser.

   Typically, the list of available DOH services is vetted by the
   application's vendor to assure that they will honour the
   application's requirements for handling of sensitive data (i.e., the
   client's DNS request stream) and similar concerns.

   This document proposes a means of selecting a DOH server that
   encourages the deployment of DOH servers by sharing some of its
   additional benefits with servers that are good candidates for serving
   DOH traffic.

1.1.  DOH's Additional Benefits for Associated Services

   When a DOH server is colocated with (or closely coordinated with)
   other network services - especially HTTP services - those associated
   services enjoy a few additional benefits beyond those seen by
   adopting DOH in the first place.





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   o  Associated services have an additional privacy benefit; there is
      one less party involved in the interaction, whereas "normal" DNS
      and DOH to an unassociated HTTP server require a third party to
      resolve names.

   o  Removing a third party also removes a separate point of potential
      failure, improving control over service quality and availability.
      See [fragile] for further discussion.

   o  Finally, the DOH server can use DNS to optimise the provision of
      associated services.  For example, DNS results can be optimised
      based on the client's request stream with a higher degree of
      certainty.

   In the future, a DOH server might might use Secondary Certificates
   [I-D.ietf-httpbis-http2-secondary-certs] to further optimise
   performance of associated services, by using the information in the
   DNS request stream to aggregate all of its traffic into a small
   number of connections (possibly only one), thereby allowing greater
   coordination of congestion control and avoiding connection setup
   costs.

1.2.  Achieving DOH's Privacy Goals through Diversity

   Overall, a major goal for deployment of DOH is to assure that DNS
   connectivity is robust and private.  Arguably, this is best served by
   having a diverse set of available DOH servers that are colocated with
   popular HTTP content, so that it's more difficult to discriminate DOH
   from "regular" HTTP, and so the it's more difficult to block DOH
   services, due to the high impact of blocking a popular site.

   One way to encourage the development of such a set is to offer the
   additional benefits above to parties that are good candidates for
   serving such traffic.  When clients can direct their DOH queries to
   the HTTP server which will eventually serve their traffic, it
   provides both better privacy properties and better performance and
   availability to a broader set of servers.

   This is a marked improvement over the static configuration mechanism
   commonly in place now; accruing such privacy, availability, and
   performance benefits to whatever DOH server the application or user
   selects means that only parties who have a relationship with that
   service will realise these benefits.

   This document proposes one way to achieve this.






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2.  Conventions and Definitions

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
   "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP
   14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
   capitals, as shown here.

3.  DOH Digests

   A DOH Digest is a Bloom filter indicating the set of hosts a given
   DOH server should be used for.

3.1.  Using DOH Digests

   When an application has a valid DOH digest for a given DOH server, it
   tests the digest for each DNS request it makes by hostname; if the
   hostname (after normalisation) is found in the digest, all DNS
   requests regarding that hostname SHOULD be sent to the corresponding
   DOH server.  If multiple DOH digests match a given hostname, any
   matching DOH server MAY be used; the client SHOULD select one of the
   candidates randomly.

   If the DOH service is unavailable, produces errors (HTTP or DNS), or
   the application otherwise fails to obtain an answer from it, the
   application MAY (but is not required to) fall back to using another
   configured DOH server, or to using "normal" DNS.

   Likewise, hosts that do not match any configured bloom filter SHOULD
   be sent to a randomly selected DOH server that is available.

   The means of discovering a DOH digest for a given DOH server is out
   of scope for this document, but generally it will be pre-arranged
   between the application and the DOH server.

   The nature of this arrangment is highly dependent upon the
   application and its desired properties.  That said, a number of
   requirements are placed upon this arrangement.

   o  The digest MUST be conveyed in a manner that is secure and
      authenticated; e.g., TLS with appropriate certificate checks.
      Clients MUST enforce this.

   o  The application MUST consider the DOH service as meeting whatever
      criteria it deems fit for configuring a "catch-all" DOH service
      (e.g., in terms of privacy, service availability, etc.), since
      false positives might be sent to the service, and hosts not
      matched by any configured bloom filter might be sent to it.



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   o  The digest MUST be updated on a periodic basis; e.g., once a day.
      Clients SHOULD NOT use stale digests.

3.2.  The DOH Digest Format

   TBD - likely just a bloom filter.

3.3.  Hostname Normalisation

   TBD

4.  Security Considerations

   Because a DOH digest allows a DOH server to claim traffic from an
   arbitrary hostname, applications need to take extreme care in
   selecting the DOH servers they will be accepted from, as well as
   assuring that their integrity and authentication have not been
   compromised.

   Applications might mitigate this by monitoring DOH servers for such
   abuse and terminating their ability to use DOH digests when it is
   found.

   TBD - more advanced mitigations

   A hostname is effectively captured by a DOH server until the digest
   that reflects any change in its status is updated in the application.
   This delay should not result in any loss of functionality, since the
   "old" configuration will still direct requests to a functional DOH
   server.

5.  IANA Considerations

   This document currently has no IANA actions, but may grow some as the
   document progresses.

6.  References

6.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.

   [RFC8174]  Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
              2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
              May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.



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6.2.  Informative References

   [fragile]  Kashaf, A., Zarate, C., Wang, H., Agarwal, Y., and V.
              Sekar, "Oh, What a Fragile Web We Weave: Third-party
              Service Dependencies In Modern Webservices and
              Implications", June 2018,
              <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.08420.pdf>.

   [I-D.ietf-doh-dns-over-https]
              Hoffman, P. and P. McManus, "DNS Queries over HTTPS
              (DoH)", draft-ietf-doh-dns-over-https-14 (work in
              progress), August 2018.

   [I-D.ietf-httpbis-http2-secondary-certs]
              Bishop, M., Sullivan, N., and M. Thomson, "Secondary
              Certificate Authentication in HTTP/2", draft-ietf-httpbis-
              http2-secondary-certs-04 (work in progress), April 2019.

Author's Address

   Mark Nottingham

   Email: mnot@mnot.net
   URI:   https://www.mnot.net/



























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