Replying to Avatar Cyph3rp9nk

Another basic and very easy privacy tip for everyone.

Encrypt all your home DNS queries.

By default DNS queries are not encrypted and it is very easy for an external attacker to know all the websites you query, for example, by sneaking into your network and running a packet sniffer like Wireshark, but what is worse, your ISP can see everything and use this data to treat them and in the best case to sell them, in the worst case to make behavioral profiles for your favorite government.

If an attacker manages to penetrate our network, it is difficult to prevent him from sniffing our DNS queries, to prevent it in this case we would have to use DoH on all devices and unfortunately most home devices do not support it. Although we can easily solve that your ISP can't see your DNS queries.

How? Most devices do not support DoH.

Simply install an Adguard home device on your network, you can use your Raspberry for example or a virtual machine that is always on as a proxmox container that consumes virtually no memory or disk space.

Configure Adguard Home to perform DNS queries through DoH, I recommend using Quad9 as they have a better privacy policy than Cloudfare.

In your router change the DNS that is assigned by DHCP to the ip of the machine where Adguard Home is installed, this way all the devices in your home will make DNS queries to the Adguard server and this in turn will redirect the query by DoH to Quad9 so your ISP will not be able to intercept your DNS queries.

The trust and centralization with quad9 still remains in that setup.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Yes, unfortunately the design of the public DNS system is highly centralized, there are no alternatives.

"Quad9 advertises itself as a global public name server that aims to protect users against malware and phishing. Quad9 is operated by the Quad9 Foundation, a Swiss non-profit, public benefit foundation whose goal is to improve the privacy and cybersecurity of Internet users, based in Zurich.

Quad9 is not an open source project, but uses open source software as the basis for its service. For example, Quad9 uses Unbound as a recursive DNS server, Knot Resolver as an authoritative DNS server and PowerDNS as a management DNS server2. Quad9 also collaborates with other open source organizations such as NLnet Labs, ISC and CZ.NIC3."

How to build your own DNS authoritative server? If someone could create a software easy as adguardhome, but to setup their own DNS server, it would help a lot, or am I missing something?

Impossible, the dns server system is hierarchical in zones, downloading all the zones, that is to say all the records would be petabytes of data.