When you type a web address or domain name into your address bar, your browser sends a request over the Internet to look up the IP address for that website. To learn more about Firewalla DNS Services, here is a detailed guide: DNS Services Introduction. It is more secure than the traditional DNS and helps protect user privacy.
Time to get some sleep.DNS over HTTPS ( DoH) is a protocol for performing remote Domain Name System (DNS) resolution via the HTTPS protocol. I am going to keep encryption enabled especially when travelling from now onwards. Here’s how it looks like in wireshark: That’s all about it for now. I ran another query and saved it in pcap file. Thus all that appears here is just an encrypted packet to Cisco OpenDNS over UDP port 443. While in parallel if I watch for traffic towards OpenDNS public IPs, I get: sudo tcpdump -i en0 'dst 208.67.220.220 or dst 208.67.222.222' -n This shows request went in clear text to 127.0.0.54 which is configured on loopback.
Tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode Here’s an example of a DNS query to resolve A record of while running tcpdumps in parallel: sudo tcpdump -i lo0 'dst port 53' -n This is also one of reasons why DNSCrypt is also known as DNS over HTTPS. The encyption is based on trusted root CA’s and associated chain as popularly used in HTTPS.
As soon as the client gets port 53 DNS queries, it encrypts it and sends via UDP port 443 (UDP or TCP depending on provider and client configuration). Here it shows that DNS resolver in my case happens to be Cisco’s OpenDNS. The client often offers support of various open resolvers like OpenDNS, Quad9 etc. Once configured, the client changes system’s DNS resolver to a local IP which listens for port 53 (regular/non-encrypted) requests. There are number of projects like dnscrypt-osxclient available on GitHub which enable this support. So how does it work? There’s no integrated support of DNSCrypt in OS’es at this time. (Beyond that resolver still, follow usual non-encrypted root chain to reach authoritative DNS servers). DNSCrypt offers to encrypt of DNS queries from clients to the DNS resolvers. A better and more modern way out of it is by using encryption in DNS by using a protocol named “ DNSCrypt”. It works and does the task but performance can vary greatly depending on how far is the tunnel server. So what can be done about these cases? Well, one way is VPN of course but with a setup where VPN server’s IP address is hardcoded in the client and not using DNS. This belongs to WorldLink Communications (ISP here in Nepal) and I am just 5 hops away from it. So clearly something in middle is hijacking DNS queries and no matter whichever DNS resolver I try to use, the queries actually hit authoritative DNS via 202.79.32.164. Let’s try to verify it using popular “” query. This seems unusual and is the result of basically port 53 DNS hijack. Have a look at these weird DNS replies: dig. I found that many of the servers appear to be DNS resolvers which is unusual. Writing this post from my hotel room in Kathmandu.