Retiring Internet Explorer

Prelude

In late 2004, I was the Program Manager for Microsoft’s clipart website, delivering a million pieces of clipart to Microsoft Office customers every day. It was great fun. But there was a problem– our “Clip of the Day” feature, meant to spotlight a new and topical piece of clipart every day, wasn’t changing as expected.

After much investigation (could the browser itself really be wrong?!?), I wrote to the IE team to complain about what looked like bugs in its caching implementation. In a terse reply, I was informed that the handful of people then left on the browser team were only working on critical security fixes, and my caching problems weren’t nearly important enough to even look at.

That night, unable to sleep, I tossed and turned and fumed at the seeming arrogance of the job link in the respondent’s email signature… “Want to change the world? Join the new IE team today!”

Gradually, though, I calmed down and reasoned it through… While the product wasn’t exactly beloved, everyone I knew with a computer used Internet Explorer. Arrogant or not, it was probably accurate that there was nothing I could do with my career at that time that would have as big an impact as joining the IE team. And, I smugly realized that if I joined the team, I’d get access to the IE source code, and could go root out those caching bugs myself.

I reached out to the IE lead for an informational interview the following day, and passed an interview loop shortly thereafter.

After joining the team, I printed out the source code for the network stack and sat down with a red pen. There were no fewer than six different bugs causing my “Clip of the Day gets stuck” issue. When my devs fixed the last of them, I mentioned this and my story to my GPM (boss’ boss).

“Does this mean you’re a retention risk?” Tony asked.

“Maybe after we fix the rest of these…” I retorted, pointing at the pile of paper with almost a hundred red circles.

No one in the world loved IE as much as I did, warts and all. Investigating, documenting, and fixing problems in Internet Explorer was a nearly all-consuming passion throughout my twenties. IE9 was a fantastic, best-of-its-time browser, and I’ll forever be proud of it. But as IE9 wound down and the Windows 8 adventure began, it was already clear that its lead would not last against the Chrome juggernaut.

I shipped IE7, IE8, IE9, and IE10, leaving Microsoft in late 2012, shortly after IE10 was finished, to build Fiddler for Telerik.

In 2015, I changed my default browser to Chrome. In 2016, I joined the Chrome Security team. I left Google in the summer of 2018 and rejoined the Microsoft Edge team, and that summer and fall I spent 50% of my time rediscovering bugs that I’d first found in IE and blogged about a decade before.

Fortunately, Edge’s faster development pace meant that we actually got to fix some of the bugs this time, but Chrome’s advantages in nearly every dimension left Edge very much in an underdog status. Fortunately, the other half of my time was spent working on our (then) secret project to replatform the next version of our Edge browser atop the open-source Chromium project.

We’ve now shipped our best browser ever — the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge. I hope you’ll try it out.

It’s with love that I beg you… please let Internet Explorer retire to the great bitbucket in the sky. It’s time. It’s been time for a long time.

Burndown List

Last night, as I read the details of yet another 0-day security bug in Internet Explorer, I posted the following throwaway tweet, which netted a surprising number of interactions:

I expected the usual slew of “Yeah, IE is terrible,” and “IE was always terrible,” and “Somebody tell my {boss,school,parents}” responses, but I didn’t really expect serious replies. I got some, however, and they’re interesting.

Shared Credentials

Internet Explorer shares a common networking stack (WinINET) and Cookie Jar (for Intranet/Trusted sites) with many native code applications on Windows, including Windows Explorer. Tim identifies a scenario where Windows Explorer relies on an auth cookie being found in the WinINET cookie jar, put there by Internet Explorer. We’ve seen similar scenarios in some Microsoft Office flows.

Depending on a cookie set by Internet Explorer might’ve been somewhat reasonable in 2003, but Vista/IE7’s introduction of Protected Mode (and cookie jar partitioning) in 2006 made this a fragile architecture. The fact that anything depends upon it in 2020 is appalling.

Thoughts: I need to bang on some doors. This is depressing.

Certificate Issuance

Developers who apply digital signatures to their apps and server operators who expose their sites over HTTPS do so using a digital certificate. In ideal cases, getting a certificate is automatic and doesn’t involve a browser at all, but some Certificate Authorities require browser-based flows. Those flows often demand that the user use either Internet Explorer or Firefox because the former supports ActiveX Controls for certificate issuance, while Firefox, until recently, supported the Keygen element.

WebCrypto, now supported in all modern browsers, serves as a modern replacement for these deprecated approaches, and some certificate issuers are starting to build issuance flows atop it.

Thoughts: We all need to send some angry emails. Companies in the Trust space should not be built atop insecure technologies.

Banking, especially in Asia

A fascinating set of circumstances led to Internet Explorer’s dominance in Asian markets. First, early browsers had poor support for Unicode and East Asian character sets, forcing website developers to build their own text rendering atop native code plugins (ActiveX). South Korea mandated use of a locally-developed cipher (SEED) for banking transactions[1], and this cipher was not implemented by browser developers… ActiveX again to the rescue. Finally, since all users were using IE, and were accustomed to installing ActiveX controls, malware started running rampant, so banks and other financial institutions started bundling “security solutions” (aka rootkits) into their ActiveX controls. Every user’s browser was a battlefield with warring native code trying to get the upper hand. A series of beleaguered Microsoft engineers (including Ed Praitis, who helped inspire me to make my first significant code commits to the browser) spent long weeks trying to keep all of this mess working as we rearchitected the browser, built Protected Mode and later Enhanced Protected Mode, and otherwise modernized a codebase nearing its second decade.

Thoughts: IE marketshare in Asia may be higher than other places, but it can’t be nearly as high as it once was. Haven’t these sites all pivoted to mobile apps yet?

Reader Survey: Do you have any especially interesting scenarios where you’re forced to use Internet Explorer? Sound off in the comments below!

Q&A

Q: I get that IE is terrible, but I’m an enterprise admin and I own 400 websites running lousy websites written by a vendor in a hurry back in 2004. These sites will not be updated, and my employees need to keep using them. What can I do?

A: The new Chromium-based Edge has an IE Mode; you can configure your users so that Edge will use an Internet Explorer tab when loading those sites, directly within Edge itself.

Q: Uh, isn’t IE Mode a security risk?

A: Any use of an ancient web engine poses some risk, but IE Mode dramatically reduces the risk, by ensuring that only sites selected by the IT Administrator load in IE mode. Everything else seamlessly transitions back to the modern, performant and secure Chromium Edge engine.

Q: What about Web Browser Controls (WebOCs) inside my native code applications?

A: In many cases, WebOCs inside a native application are used to render trusted content delivered from the application itself, or from a server controlled by the application’s vendor. In such cases, and presuming that all content is loaded over HTTPS, the security risk of the use of a WebOC is significantly lower. Rendering untrusted HTML in a WebOC is strongly discouraged, as WebOCs are even less secure than Internet Explorer itself. For compatibility reasons, numerous security features are disabled-by-default in WebOCs, and the WebOC does not run content in any type of process sandbox.

Looking forward, the new Chromium-based WebView2 control should be preferred over WebOCs for scenarios that require the rendering of HTML content within an application.

Q: Does this post mean anything has changed with regard to Internet Explorer’s support lifecycle, etc?

A: No. Internet Explorer will remain a supported product until its support lifecycle runs out. I’m simply begging you to not use it except to download a better browser.

Footnotes

[1] The SEED cipher wasn’t just a case of the South Korean government suffering from not-invented-here, but instead a response to the fact that the US Government at the time forbid export of strong crypto.

Capture Network Logs from Edge and Chrome

Problems in accessing websites can often be found and fixed if the network traffic between the browser and the website is captured as the problem occurs. This short post explains how to capture such logs.

Capturing Network Traffic Logs

If someone asked you to read this post, chances are good that you were asked to capture a web traffic log to track down a bug in a website or your web browser.

Fortunately, in Google Chrome or the new Microsoft Edge (version 76+), capturing traffic is simple:

  1. Optional but helpful: Close all browser tabs but one.
  2. Navigate the tab to chrome://net-export
  3. In the UI that appears, press the Start Logging to Disk button.
  4. Choose a filename to save the traffic to. Tip: Pick a location you can easily find later, like your Desktop.
  5. Reproduce the networking problem in a new tab. If you close or navigate the //net-export tab, the logging will stop automatically.
  6. After reproducing the problem, press the Stop Logging button.
  7. Share the Net-Export-Log.json file with whomever will be looking at it. Optional: If the resulting file is very large, you can compress it to a ZIP file.
Network Capture UI

Privacy-Impacting Options

In some cases, especially when you dealing with a problem in logging into a website, you may need to set either the Include cookies and credentials or Include raw bytes options before you click the Start Logging button.

Note that there are important security & privacy implications to selecting these options– if you do so, your capture file will almost certainly contain private data that would allow a bad actor to steal your accounts or perform other malicious actions. Share the capture only with a person you trust and do not post it on the Internet in a public forum.

Tutorial Video

If you’re more of a visual learner, here’s a short video demonstrating the traffic capture process.

In a future post, I’ll explore how developers can use the NetLog Viewer to analyze captured traffic.

-Eric

References

Disabling TLS/1.0 and TLS/1.1 in the new Edge Browser

HTTPS traffic is encrypted and protected from snooping and modification by an underlying protocol called Transport Layer Security (TLS). Disabling outdated versions of the TLS security protocol will help move the web forward toward a more secure future. All major browsers (including Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer and the old Edge) have publicly committed to require TLS version 1.2 or later by default starting in the first half of 2020.

Starting in Edge 82, reaching stable ~late-April 2020, the legacy TLS/1.0 and TLS/1.1 protocols will be disabled by default. These older protocol versions are less secure than the TLS/1.2 and TLS/1.3 protocols that are now widely supported by websites:

To help users and IT administrators discover sites that still only support legacy TLS versions, the edge://flags/#show-legacy-tls-warnings flag was introduced in Edge Canary version 81.0.392. Simply set the flag to Enabled and restart the browser for the change to take effect:

Subsequently, if you visit a site that requires TLS/1.0 or TLS/1.1, the lock icon will be replaced with a “Not Secure” warning in the address box, alongside the warning in the F12 Developer Tools Console:

As shown earlier in this post, almost all sites are already able to negotiate TLS/1.2. For those that aren’t, it’s typically either a simple configuration option in either the server’s registry or web server configuration file. (Note that you can leave TLS/1.0 and TLS/1.1 enabled on the server if you like, as browsers will negotiate the latest common protocol version).

In some cases, server software may have no support for TLS/1.2 and will need to be updated to a version with such support. However, we expect that these cases will be rare—the TLS/1.2 protocol is now over 11 years old.

Organizations with internal sites that are not yet prepared for this change can set the SSLVersionMin Group Policy to an earlier version. This policy will remain available until the removal of the TLS/1.0 and TLS/1.1 protocols from Chromium in January 2021.

Thanks for your help in securing the web!

-Eric

WebOCs and HTTP/2

If you’ve built an application using the old Web Browser Control (mshtml, aka Internet Explorer), you might notice that by default it does not support HTTP/2. For instance, a trivial WebOC host loading Akamai’s HTTP2 test page:

When your program is running on any build of Windows 10, you can set a Feature Control Key with your process’ name to opt-in to using HTTP/2.

For applications running at the OS-native bitness, write the key here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_WEBOC_ENABLE_HTTP2

For 32-bit applications running on 64-bit Windows, write it here:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_WEBOC_ENABLE_HTTP2

Like so:

After you make this change and restart the application, it will use HTTP/2 if the server and network path supports it.

Using HTTP/2 should help improve performance and can even resolve functional bugs.

-Eric

The Pitfalls of EventSource over HTTP/1.1

While there are many different ways for servers to stream data to clients, the Server-sent Events / EventSource Interface is one of the simplest. Your code simply creates an EventSource and then subscribes to its onmessage callback:

Implementing the server side is almost as simple: your handler just prefaces each piece of data it wants to send to the client with the string data: and ends it with a double line-ending (\n\n). Easy peasy. You can see the API in action in this simple demo.

I’ve long been sad that we didn’t manage to get this API into Internet Explorer or the Legacy Edge browser. While many polyfills for the API exist, I was happy that we finally have EventSource in the new Edge.

Yay! \o/

Alas, I wouldn’t be writing this post if I hadn’t learned something new yesterday.

Last week, a customer reached out to complain that the new Edge and Chrome didn’t work well with their webmail application. After they used the webmail site for a some indeterminate amount time, they noticed that its performance slowed to a crawl– switching between messages would take tens of seconds or longer, and the problem reproduced regardless of the speed of the network. The only way to reliably resolve the problem was to either close the tabs they’d opened from the main app (e.g. the individual email messages could be opened in their own tabs) or to restart the browser entirely.

As the networking PM, I was called in to figure out what was going wrong over video conference. I instructed the user to open the F12 Developer Tools and we looked at the network console together. Each time the user clicked on a message, new requests were created and sat in the (pending) state for a long time, meaning that the requests were getting queued and weren’t even going to the network promptly.

But why? Diagnosing this remotely wasn’t going to be trivial, so I had the user generate a Network Export log that I could examine later.

In examining the log using the online viewer, the problem became immediately clear. On the Sockets tab, the webmail’s server showed 19 requests in the Pending state, and 6 Active connections to the server, none of which were idle. The fact that there were six connections strongly suggested that the server was using HTTP/1.1 rather than HTTP/2, and a quick look at the HTTP/2 tab confirmed it. Looking at the Events tab, we see five outstanding URLRequests to a URL that strongly suggests that it’s being used as an EventSource:

Each of these sockets is in the READING_RESPONSE state, and each has returned just ten bytes of body data to each EventSource. The web application is using one EventSource instance of the app, and the user has five tabs open to the app.

And now everything falls into place. Browsers limit themselves to 6 concurrent connections per server. When the server supports HTTP/2, browsers typically need just one connection because HTTP/2 supports multiplexing many (typically 100) streams onto a single connection. HTTP/1.1 doesn’t afford that luxury, so every long-lived connection used by a page decrements the available connections by one. So, for this user, all of their network traffic was going down a single HTTP/1.1 connection, and because HTTP/1.1 doesn’t allow multiplexing, it means that every action in the UI was blocked on a very narrow head-of-line-blocking pipe.

Looking in the Chrome bug tracker, we find this core problem (“SSE connections can starve other requests”) resolved “By Design” six years ago.

Now, I’m always skeptical when reading old bugs, because many issues are fixed over time, and it’s often the case that an old resolution is no longer accurate in the modern world. So I built a simple repro script for Meddler. The script returns one of four responses:

  • An HTML page that consumes an EventSource
  • An HTML page containing 15 frames pointed at the previous HTML page
  • An event source endpoint (text/event-stream)
  • A JPEG file (to test whether connection limits apply across both EventSources and other downloads)

And sure enough, when we load the page we see that only six frames are getting events from the EventSource, and the images that are supposed to load at the bottom of the frames never load at all:

Similarly, if we attempt to load the page in another tab, we find that it doesn’t even load, with a status message of “Waiting for available socket…”

The web app owners should definitely enable HTTP/2 on their server, which will make this problem disappear for almost all of their users.

However, even HTTP/2 is not a panacea, because the user might be behind a “break-and-inspect” proxy that downgrades connections to HTTP/1.1, or the browser might conceivably limit parallel requests on HTTP/2 connections for slow networks. As noted in the By Design issue, a server depending on EventSource in multiple tabs might use a BroadcastChannel or a SharedWorker to share a single EventSource connection with all of the tabs of the web application.

Alternatively, swapping an EventSource architecture with one based on WebSocket (even one that exposes itself as a EventSource polyfill) will also likely resolve the problem. That’s because, even if the client or server doesn’t support routing WebSockets over HTTP/2, the WebSockets-Per-Host limit is 255 in Chromium and 200 in Firefox.

Stay responsive out there!

-Eric

Web-to-WebApp Communication: Custom Scheme Handlers

I’ve previously written about Web-to-App communication via Application Protocols. App Protocols allow web content to invoke a native application outside of the browser.

WebApp advocates (like me!) want to continue to close the native/browser gaps that prevent web applications from becoming full-fledged replacements for native apps. To that end, I’ve recently spent some time looking at how the web platform allows JavaScript registration of a protocol handler, where the handling “app” is a same-origin web page.

Currently supported by Firefox and Chromium-based browsers (on platforms other than Android), the function navigator.registerProtocolHandler(scheme, url_template, description) enables a website to become a handler for a URL scheme.

Real-World Usage

The canonical use-case for this is web based email clients like Gmail. Gmail would like to be able to be the user’s handler for mailto links. When the user clicks a mailto link, the content of the link should be sent to a handler page on mail.google.com which responds accordingly (e.g. by creating a new email to the specified addressee).

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?extsrc=mailto&url=mailto:u@example.com

The registerProtocolHandler API isn’t limited to the mailto scheme, however. It presently supports a short list of allowed schemes1, and any scheme named web+{one-or-more-lowercaseASCII}.

User Experience

I’ve built a page containing a number of test cases here. When you push the button to register a protocol handler, you receive a permission prompt from Chrome/Edge or Firefox:

ChromePrompt

FirefoxPrompt

To avoid annoying users, if the user declines Chrome’s prompt, the site is blocked from re-requesting permission to handle the protocol. A user must manually visit the settings page to unblock permission.

User-Gesture Requirements

If a page attempts to call registerProtocolHandler() on load or before the user has interacted with the page (a so called “gesture”), then Chromium-based browsers will not pop the permission prompt. Instead, an overlapping-diamonds icon is shown at the right-hand side of the address bar, with the text “This page wants to install a service handler.” Here’s what this looks like on Gmail:

RegisterServiceHandler

Settings

Within Chrome, you can view your currently registered handlers (and sites blocked from asking to become the registered handler) by visiting chrome://settings/content/handlers.

ProtocolSettings

Operating System Integration

One particularly interesting aspect of allowing web-based registration of protocol handlers is that it is desirable for the rest of the operating system outside of the browser to respect those protocol handler associations.

For example, clicking a mailto link in some other application should launch the browser to the web-based handler if registered. However, having the browser change system state in this manner is complicated, especially on modern versions of Windows whereby various protections have been put in place to try to prevent “hijacking” of file type and protocol handler associations.

Edge and Chrome will only attempt to become the systemwide handler for a protocol when running a channel that offers to become the default browser (e.g. Stable). On such a channel, if the browser wasn’t already the handler for the protocol, after the user clicks “Allow” on the Chrome permission bubble, a Windows UAC dialog is shown:

UAC

If the user accepts by clicking “Yes”, the RegisterChromeForProtocol function silently updates the registry:

RegistryWrites

Other Things I’ve Learned

  • Chrome, Edge, and Firefox disallow registration of protocol handlers in Private/Incognito/InPrivate modes.
  • With my patch landed, Chrome, Edge, and Firefox disallow registration of protocol handlers from non-secure contexts (e.g. HTTP). Due to the same-origin requirement for the handler URL, this effectively prevents the use of a non-secure page as a handler.
  • An upcoming patch proposes blocking registration from cross-origin subframes.
  • Chromium-based browsers enable IT admins to set default scheme-to-web mappings using Group Policy.
  • Chrome presently fails to enforce specified limits on web+ protocol names. Firefox does enforce the limits.
  • Firefox does not support targeting a RPH registered protocol as the target of a form POST request; it silently drops the POST body.
  • Firefox does not implement the unregisterProtocolHandler API. Users must manually unregister protocol handlers using the browser UI.
  • On Windows at least, neither Firefox Stable nor Firefox Nightly seems to try to become the systemwide handler for a scheme.

-Eric

1 The permitted schemes are bitcoin, geo, im, irc, ircs, magnet, mailto, mms, news, nntp, openpgp4fpr, sip, sms, smsto, ssh, tel, urn, webcal, wtai, xmpp.

Thoughts on DNS-over-HTTPS

Type https://example.com in your web browser’s address bar and hit enter.

What happens?

Before connecting to the example.com server, your browser must convert “example.com” to the network address at which that server is located.

dns

It does this lookup using a protocol called “DNS.” Today, most DNS transactions are conducted in plaintext (not encrypted) by sending UDP messages to the DNS resolver your computer is configured to use.

There are a number of problems with the 36-year-old DNS protocol, but a key one is that the unencrypted use of UDP traffic means that network intermediaries can see (and potentially modify) your lookups, such that attackers can know where you’re browsing, and potentially even direct your traffic to some other server.

The DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) protocol attempts to address some of these problems by sending DNS traffic over a HTTPS connection to the DNS resolver. The encryption (TLS/QUIC) of the connection helps prevent network intermediaries from knowing what addresses your browser is looking up– your queries are private between your PC and the DNS resolver that is providing the answers. The expressiveness of HTTP (with request and response headers) provides interesting options for future extensibility, and the modern HTTP2 and HTTP3 protocols aim to provide high-performance and parallel transactions with a single connection.

Try It

Support for DNS-over-HTTPS is coming to many browsers and operating systems (including a future version of Windows). You can even try DoH out in the newest version of Microsoft Edge (v79+) by starting the browser with a special command line flag. The following command line will start the browser and instruct it to perform DNS lookups using the Cloudflare DoH server:

msedge.exe --enable-features="DnsOverHttps<DoHTrial" --force-fieldtrials="DoHTrial/Group1" --force-fieldtrial-params="DoHTrial.Group1:Fallback/false/Templates/https%3A%2F%cloudflare-dns.com%2Fdns-query"

You can test to see whether the feature is working as expected by visiting https://1.1.1.1/help. Unfortunately, this command line flag presently only works on unmanaged PCs, meaning it doesn’t do anything from PCs that are joined to a Windows domain.

Some Thoughts, In No Particular Order

Long-time readers of this blog know that I want to “HTTPS ALL THE THINGS” and DNS is no exception. Unfortunately, as with most protocol transitions, this turns out to be very very complicated.

SNI

The privacy benefits of DNS-over-HTTPS are predicated on the idea that a network observer, blinded from your DNS lookups by encryption, will not be able to see where you’re browsing.

Unfortunately, network observers, by definition, can observe your traffic, even if the traffic encrypted.

The network observer will still see the IP addresses you’re connecting to, and that’s often sufficient to know what sites you’re browsing.

Worse, they are usually still able to tell what specific HTTPS site you’re visiting on that IP address. That’s because one of the current limitations of HTTPS is that the browser sends, in unencrypted form a Server Name Indication (SNI), the hostname it expects to see in the server’s certificate as a part of the ClientHello HTTPS handshake message. Closing this hole requires implementation of Encrypted SNI (ESNI) and this feature is not yet implemented in Chromium.

Privacy From Observers, Not the Resolver

If your Internet Service Provider (say, for example, Comcast) is configured to offer DNS-over-HTTPS, and your browser uses their resolver, your network lookups are protected from observers on the local network, but not from the Comcast resolver.

Because the data handling practices of resolvers are often opaque, and because there are business incentives for resolvers to make use of lookup data (for advertising targeting or analytics revenue), it could be the case that the very actor you are trying to hide your traffic from (e.g. your ISP) is exactly the one holding the encryption key you’re using to encrypt the lookup traffic.

To address this, some users choose to send their traffic not to the default resolver their device is configured to use (typically provided by the ISP) but instead send the lookups to a “Public Resolver” provided by a third-party with a stronger privacy promise.

However, this introduces its own complexities.

Public Resolvers Don’t Know Private Addresses

A key problem in the deployment of DNS-over-HTTPS is that public resolvers (Google Public DNS, Cloudflare, Open DNS, etc) cannot know the addresses of servers that are within an intranet. If your browser attempts to look up a hostname on your intranet (say MySecretServer.intranet.MyCo.com) using the public resolver, the public resolver not only gets information about your internal network (e.g. now Google knows that you have a server called MySecretServer.intranet) but it also returns “Sorry, never heard of it.” At this point, your browser has to decide what to do next. It might fail entirely (“Sorry, site not found”) or it might “Fail open” and perform a plain UDP lookup using the system-configured resolver provided by e.g. your corporate network administrator.

This fallback means that a network attacker might simply block your DoH traffic such that you perform all of your queries in unprotected fashion. Not great.

Even alerting the user to such a problem is tricky: What could the browser even say that a human might understand? “Nerdy McNerdy Nerd Nerd Nerd Nerd Nerd Address Nerd Resolution Nerd Geek. Privacy. Network. Nerdery. Geekery. Continue?”

Centralization Isn’t Great

Centralizing DNS resolutions to the (relatively small) set of public DNS providers is contentious, at best. Some European jurisdictions are uncomfortable about the idea that their citizens’ DNS lookups might be sent to an American tech giant.

Some privacy-focused users are primarily worried about the internet giants (e.g. Google, Cloudflare) and are very nervous that the rise of DoH will result in browsers sending traffic to these resolvers by default. Google has said they won’t do that in Chrome, while Firefox is experimenting with using Cloudflare by default in some locales.

Content Filtering

Historically, DNS resolutions were a convenient choke point for schools, corporations, and parents to implement content filtering policies. By interfering with DNS lookups for sites that network users are forbidden to visit (e.g adult content, sites that put the user’s security at risk, or sites that might result in legal liability for the organization), these organizations were able to easily prevent non-savvy users from connecting to unwanted sites. Using DoH to a Public DNS provider bypasses these types of content filters, leaving the organization with unappealing choices: start using lower-granularity network interception (e.g. blocking by IP addresses), installing content-filters on the user’s devices directly, or attempting to block DoH resolvers entirely and forcing the user’s devices to fall back to the filtered resolver.

Geo CDNs and Other Tricks

In the past, DNS was one mechanism that a geographically distributed CDN could use to load-balance its traffic such that users get the “best” answers for their current locale. For instance, if the resolver was answering a query from a user in Australia, it might return a different server address than when resolving a query from a user in Florida.

These schemes and others get more complicated when the user isn’t using a local DNS resolver and is instead using a central public resolver, possibly provided by a competitor to the sites that the user is trying to visit.

Don’t Despair

Despite these challenges and others, DNS-over-HTTPS represents an improvement over the status quo, and as browser and OS engineering teams and standards bodies invest in addressing these problems, we can expect that deployment and use of DoH will grow more common in the coming years.

DoH will eventually be a part of a more private and secure web.

-Eric Lawrence