Sandra Siby (EPFL), Marc Juarez (University of Southern California), Claudia Diaz (imec-COSIC KU Leuven), Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez (IMDEA Networks Institute), Carmela Troncoso (EPFL)

Virtually every connection to an Internet service is preceded by a DNS lookup which is performed without any traffic-level protection, thus enabling manipulation, redirection, surveillance, and censorship. To address these issues, large organizations such as Google and Cloudflare are deploying recently standardized protocols that encrypt DNS traffic between end users and recursive resolvers such as DNS-over-TLS (DoT) and DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH). In this paper, we examine whether encrypting DNS traffic can protect users from traffic analysis-based monitoring and censoring. We propose a novel feature set to perform the attacks, as those used to attack HTTPS or Tor traffic are not suitable for DNS’ characteristics. We show that traffic analysis enables the identification of domains with high accuracy in closed and open world settings, using 124 times less data than attacks on HTTPS flows. We find that factors such as location, resolver, platform, or client do mitigate the attacks performance but they are far from completely stopping them. Our results indicate that DNS-based censorship is still possible on encrypted DNS traffic. In fact, we demonstrate that the standardized padding schemes are not effective. Yet, Tor — which does not effectively mitigate traffic analysis attacks on web traffic— is a good defense against DoH traffic analysis.

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Benjamin Zi Hao Zhao (University of New South Wales and Data61 CSIRO), Hassan Jameel Asghar (Macquarie University and Data61 CSIRO), Mohamed Ali Kaafar (Macquarie University and Data61 CSIRO)

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Ren Ding (Georgia Institute of Technology), Hong Hu (Georgia Institute of Technology), Wen Xu (Georgia Institute of Technology), Taesoo Kim (Georgia Institute of Technology)

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Thijs van Ede (University of Twente), Riccardo Bortolameotti (Bitdefender), Andrea Continella (UC Santa Barbara), Jingjing Ren (Northeastern University), Daniel J. Dubois (Northeastern University), Martina Lindorfer (TU Wien), David Choffnes (Northeastern University), Maarten van Steen (University of Twente), Andreas Peter (University of Twente)

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Aritra Dhar (ETH Zurich), Enis Ulqinaku (ETH Zurich), Kari Kostiainen (ETH Zurich), Srdjan Capkun (ETH Zurich)

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