Traditional DNS queries and responses are sent over UDP or TCP without encryption. This is vulnerable to eavesdropping and spoofing (including DNS-based Internet filtering). Responses from recursive resolvers to clients are the most vulnerable to undesired or malicious changes, while communications between recursive resolvers and authoritative nameservers often incorporate additional protection.

To address this problem, Google Public DNS offers DNS resolution over an encrypted HTTPS connection. DNS-over-HTTPS greatly enhances privacy and security between a client and a recursive resolver, and complements DNSSEC to provide end-to-end authenticated DNS lookups.

Support for reverse lookups is also provided.

See https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/dns-over-https for more information.

Author

Bob Rudis (bob@rud.is)