Hi everyone,
I'm a Software Engineering master's student at TU Wien, Austria, with a recent focus on computer security and privacy issues. I am interested in participating in GSoC 2017, particularily in the task to support all kinds of DNS queries via Tor [1].
I've seen the mailing list discussions of 2012 and read the resulting proposition 219 [2]. What do you think, which parts of it (if any) would need to be adapted for DNS in 2017? My current impression is that not much has changed, particularily regarding DNSSEC support and deployment.
As of now, the proposal looks fairly complete with few questions remaining, the biggest research task being how to utilize libunbound for query/response parsing and construction. Implementing the RELAY DNS cells then seems fairly straightforward. Unit/integration tests and some fuzzing would be a good idea. The problem of reducing DNSSEC roundtrips (serialization) to be investigated in a later phase, I would say.
Is a separate AXFR tool still something that is desired? I have no experience with zone transfers -- can't the existing tooling just be used over a normal TCP conn through Tor?
This project idea would make a good match to my thesis in progress, for which I am researching and evaluating privacy-improving DNS tools in the context of Tor (DNSCrypt, DNS-over-TLS) [3], inspired by the awesome paper on DNS correlation [4]. For example, I recently built a SOCKS-to-SOCKS translator which allows to resolve hostnames using a resolver of choice, e.g. using DNSCrypt with TBB.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, concerns and opinions!
Best regards, Daniel
IRC handle on OFTC: idealchain
[1]: https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#supportAllDNS [2]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/219-expanded-dns.tx... [3]: My work-in-progress mindmap about DNS Privacy (not related to prop219): https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3d38csDsjwudDJOUjRleE93bjQ [4]: https://nymity.ch/dns-traffic-correlation/tor-dns.pdf