dingo

Security and privacy

encrypted dns proxy

SHOW HN2016

75points
31comments
#509of 2,264 in 2016
Top 23%of 2016 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

2 positive, 10 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 7 critical, out of 19 comments about the project. Thread score -0.27.

Privacy: 1 for, 3 againstExecution: 1 for, 2 againstIdea: 0 for, 1 againstDocs: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Useful for encrypting DNS traffic on untrusted networks.

    From 2 comments
    • When you are out and about with your laptop you are usually making your DNS calls to the local router which many view as a big privacy concern. Even if you use something like…
      dexterdog on HN
    • When you connect to any site, your browser sends the domain in clear-text (even for HTTPS - see SNI). The only way to avoid this is to use a VPN, but then you can route regular…
      icebraining on HN

Objections

  • Using go run made adoption hard; no prebuilt binaries at launch.

    From 2 comments
    • The use of `go run` here makes adopting this very hard. The benefit of using Go for projects (in my experience) is that you can build for multiple OS/Arch super, super easy. I'd…
      wyattjoh on HN
    • I think the point wyattjoh was making is that having to install the go toolchain is hindering adoption and that giving downloadable binaries that you could run directly, like…
      gouggoug on HN
  • Relies on normal DNS to resolve the server hostname.

    From 2 comments
    • Am I the only one who took a quick look at this and went "How can this DNS be 'secure' if it has to use normal DNS to look up dns.google.com?"
      ShakataGaNai on HN
    • Because you validate the certificate presented so that you know the endpoint is really Google.
      advisedwang on HN
  • Code needs gofmt and linting.

    From 1 comment
    • This code needs a pass through gofmt, among many of the other Go linting technologies.
      jzelinskie on HN
  • Not a Google project; it only uses Google's endpoint.

    From 1 comment
    • DNSCrypt (https://dnscrypt.org/) would be more elegant here (DTLS also okay) and is in-band wrapper for DNS. It's what TLS is for HTTP but for DNS and keeps things UDP. Worth…
      davidu on HN

Requests

  • Ship downloadable binaries.

    From 2 comments
    • The use of `go run` here makes adopting this very hard. The benefit of using Go for projects (in my experience) is that you can build for multiple OS/Arch super, super easy. I'd…
      wyattjoh on HN
    • I think the point wyattjoh was making is that having to install the go toolchain is hindering adoption and that giving downloadable binaries that you could run directly, like…
      gouggoug on HN
  • Use DNSCrypt or DNS over DTLS instead of HTTP.

    From 3 comments
    • DNSCrypt (https://dnscrypt.org/) would be more elegant here (DTLS also okay) and is in-band wrapper for DNS. It's what TLS is for HTTP but for DNS and keeps things UDP. Worth…
      davidu on HN
    • Encryption is nice, but does it have to be the overhead of HTTP? What would be a sensible alternative protocol?
      allendoerfer on HN
    • DNSCrypt or RFC7858 (dprive) are probably closest equivalents.
      zokier on HN

Questions

  • Why random padding up to 500 bytes in requests?

    From 1 comment
    • It seems like this includes up to 500 bytes of padding in a request. Is there a reason for that?
      nickodell on HN
  • Is SNI used for censorship?

    From 1 comment
    • "It can even \"spoof\" the TLS SNI string to avoid HTTPS firewalls..." Are you confirming SNI is being used for censorship?
      textmode on HN
  • What problem does it solve?

    From 1 comment
    • What problem does this project solve? It's not immediately obvious what the thing does from the description.
      vemv on HN

Alternatives named

  • DNSCrypt and openresolve.com resolver.

    From 1 comment
    • DNSCrypt (https://dnscrypt.org/) would be more elegant here (DTLS also okay) and is in-band wrapper for DNS. It's what TLS is for HTTP but for DNS and keeps things UDP. Worth…
      davidu on HN
  • gdns-go by ayanamist.

    From 1 comment
    • My friend also wrote a similar tool in Go. This tool uses Taobao's API to detect your external IP address so edns will not be fixed string. https://github.com/ayanamist/gdns-go
      yegle on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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