What is DNS?
Impact-Site-Verification: c4421934–7c42–4489-b04b-ead4865e7614
DNS stands for Domain Name System, and here’s a basic rundown.
Whenever you are trying to access a website, then your device needs a numeric IP address. The DNS then automatically translates the website name to a numeric IP address.
Paul V. Mockapetris invented the DNS system in 1983 as a replacement for the first iteration host.txt file, which was a simplistic version of DNS during the ARPANET days — Why is this relevant you may ask?
The internet has evolved since then, and by default, DNS is not encrypted which makes it more susceptible to external threat actors tracking your DNS requests.
Why encrypted DNS matter for your privacy?
As mentioned above, the DNS system does not encrypt your DNS requests by default, which in turn means that anyone connected to the same network as your device, has the possibility to collect data about you for malicious or ill-intended purposes.
Even though HTTPS is commonly applied in most cases to encrypt the information you send to the website itself, then without an encrypted DNS external threat actors can still track which websites you are visiting, which by itself can be valuable information to sell to e.g third parties.
The techniques, knowledge, and tools of threat actors keep evolving and could potentially re-route your DNS requests to malicious website clones in the attempt of stealing sensitive data, this can be prevented by using an encrypted DNS.
iOS 14+ — DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS protocols supported
Apple started supporting DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS protocols with the release of iOS 14.0 which made it significantly easier for even non-tech savvy individuals to install a configuration profile that enabled either of the above-mentioned protocols. For more details: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10047/
To get started I recommend using quad9’s free encrypted DNS listed below
