After setting up DNS over HTTPS, got curious how DNS leak test tools, which discover your DNS resolver, such as Browser Leaks, work 

Turns out, it's quite clever setup: while you are visiting browserleaks.com website, in the background it queries a number of hostnames generated especially for you, such as 9d0pafrc5tnu.dns4.browserleaks.net, 0zfannouveb4.dns4.browserleaks.org and so on.

Because the website generates those hostnames specifically for your session, it is able to associate your external IP to the hostnames you attempt to resolve.

Now because site operators controls authoritative name servers behind those generated hostnames - specifically ns2.browserleaks.net and ns1.browserleaks.net (also with .org), from logs they can check what exact DNS resolver asked for those unique hostnames.

Simply matching a resolver DNS that attempted to resolve those unique hostnames is enough to link it to your visit of a website session - it is often going to be the resolver of your internet service or virtual private network provider, unless you've explicitly changed your resolver to something else. Still, easily visible to authoritative DNS server.

Voila! No magic, just simple, nice setup 

Just think of how many fingerprinting schemes can big techs carry out to track you across the internet with vast compute resources available to them... 

#itsalwaysdns #dns #resolver #dnsleak #survelliance #tracking #privacy

Setting up DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is so much more complicated than DNS over TLS (DoT) 

Funny enough Mozilla Firefox  supports DoH and sets it up on application level, while Android  uses DoT on operating system level 

#itsalwaysdns #dns #dot #doh #sysadmin #linuxadmin

It's always DNS.
I can not check in to my flight tomorrow because Lufthansa's DNS responds with NXDOMAIN due to denial of existance responses.

#ItsAlwaysDNS

#TIL that *.example.com doesn't include example.com

#ItsAlwaysDNS #DNS

My mailserver is very German. When your mailserver tries to send a message, it does a reverse lookup on the IP address. If that doesn't deliver a valid hostname, you're out. But we are not done yet. If it gets a valid hostname, it does an A (IPv4) or AAAA (IPv6&) lookup on that hostname. And if it doesn't deliver back the same IP address, you are still out. It is fascinating to observe how often that uncovers that even big names get their DNS wrong. Hello, Spamcop ;)

#ItsAlwaysDNS #MailAdmin

Migrating DNS for my infra.

This definitely won’t cause any downtime issues.

#itsAlwaysDNS #selfhosted #homelab