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Firefox DNS over HTTPS

DoH

When you type a web address or domain name into your address bar (example: www.mozilla.org), your browser sends a request over the Internet to look up the IP address for that website. Traditionally, this request is sent to servers over a plain text connection. This connection is not encrypted, making it easy for third-parties to see what website you’re about to access.

DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) works differently. It sends the domain name you typed to a DoH-compatible DNS server using an encrypted HTTPS connection instead of a plain text one. This prevents third-parties from seeing what websites you are trying to access.

DoH increases our privacy and security by preventing eavesdropping and manipulation of DNS data by man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. DoH offers an opportunity to protect our privacy and communications in an untrusted environment.

While DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH), potentially, will give us the ability to conceal DNS requests from ISPs allowing us to circunvent parental controls and legally mandated blockings, we should keep in mind that our ISP is analyzing all our traffic. And the same could be happen (and usually happens) inside a corporate network. Also, in most corporate networks we won’t be able to activate the DoH options in our browser because our browser will be managed by the corporation.

We also have to keep in mind that our browsing information could be leaked in many ways. For example, with http requests all the communication will be unencrypted, and, in https request the server Name Indication (SNI) is left unencrypted. And the IP is left unencrypted regardless of the implementation.

As always, I leave the decission to activate DoH up to you.

How to enable DoH in Firefox

If you want to enable DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) in firefox, there is a step by step howto on mozilla’s support page: Firefox DNS-over-HTTPS

DoH providers

Although you can add your preferred server, Firefox provides DoH by default through:

Other DoH providers:

Thanks to Rodrigo Rega for the tips! ;)

Enjoy! ;)

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.