Summary of DNS Over HTTPS Abuse

Abstract

The Internet Engineering Task Force adopted the DNS over HTTPS protocol in 2018 to remediate privacy issues regarding the plain text transmission of the DNS protocol. According to our observations and the analysis described in this paper, protecting DNS queries using HTTPS entails security threats. This paper surveys DoH related research works and analyzes malicious and unwanted activities that leverage DNS over HTTPS and can be currently observed in the wild. Additionally, we describe three real-world abuse scenarios observed in the web environment that reveal how service providers intentionally use DNS over HTTPS to violate policies. Last but not least, we identified several research challenges that we consider important for future security research.

Keywords

• Detection
• DNS over HTTPS
• hidden communication
• IP flow
• malware
• network traffic