Decentralization, privacy and performance for DNS

Abstract

The Domain Name System (DNS) is both key determinant of a users' quality of experience (QoE) and privy to their tastes, preferences, and even the devices they own. Growing concern about user privacy and QoE has brought a number of alternative DNS techniques and services, from public DNS to encrypted and oblivious DNS. Today, a user choosing among these services and its few providers is forced to prioritize -- aware of it or not -- between web performance, privacy, reliability, and the potential for a centralized market and its consequences. We present Ónoma, a DNS resolver that addresses the concerns about DNS centralization without sacrificing privacy or QoE by sharding requests across alternative DNS services, placing these services in competition with each other, and pushing resolution to the network edge. Our preliminary evaluation shows the potential benefits of this approach across locales, with different DNS services, content providers, and content distribution networks.