A Datagram Extension to DNS Over QUIC: Proven Resource Conservation in Internet of Things

In this article, we investigate the domain name system (DNS) over QUIC (DoQ) and propose a nondisruptive extension, which can greatly reduce DNS over QUIC (DoQ)’s resource consumption. This extension can benefit all DNS clients—especially Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This is important because even resource-constrained IoT devices can generate dozens of DNS requests every hour. DNS is a crucial service that correlates IP addresses and domain names. It is traditionally sent as plain-text, favoring low-latency results over security and privacy. The repercussion of this can be eavesdropping and information leakage about IoT devices. To address these concerns, the newest and most promising solution is DoQ. QUIC offers features similar to TCP and TLS while also supporting early data delivery and stream multiplexing. DoQ’s specification requires that DNS exchanges occur over independent streams in a long-lived QUIC connection. Our hypothesis is that due to DNS’s typically high transaction volume, managing QUIC streams may be overly resource intensive for IoT devices. Therefore, we have designed and implemented a data delivery mode for DoQ using QUIC datagrams, which we believe to be more preferable than stream-based delivery. To test our theory, we analyzed the memory, CPU, signaling, power, and time of each DoQ delivery mode in a setup generating real queries and network traffic. Our novel datagram-based delivery mode proved to be decisively more resource-friendly with little compromise in terms of functionality or performance. Furthermore, this article is the first to investigate multiple queries over DoQ, to our knowledge.