Cloudflare Develops New Internet Standard Aiming to Protect User Privacy

Cloudflare has developed a new Domain Name System (DNS) standard with Apple and cloud service provider Fastly that is aimed to deliver better Internet privacy.

Cloudflare has partnered with proxy providers including Equinix, PCCW, and SURF to bring ODoH with a proxy to help protect end-user privacy.

The new protocol is designed to anonymise Web browsing information before sending it to Internet providers. It also comes as an extension to the existing DNS over HTTPS (DoH) that is meant to protect DNS requests sent from your computer to a server.

Web browsers use a DNS resolver to convert the links you provide them to machine-readable IP addresses. This impacts privacy each time a webpage is accessed.

Apple, Cloudflare, Google, and Mozilla adopted DoH in the past to resolve privacy issues at some extent. However, DoH doesn’t exactly help protect your privacy from DNS resolvers. This is where ODoH can be a real savior.

The new protocol brings a proxy server between the client and the DNS server. This means that an Internet provider won’t be able to see from where they’re getting specific queries. Identity will be protected while processing DNS requests. However, the Internet service provider (ISP) may still be able to see which websites are browsed.

Cloudflare found that response times on ODoH are “virtually indistinguishable” from the existing DoH. This suggests that there would not be any noticeable changes on the part of browsing speed.

Cloudflare had initially implemented ODoH for its 1.1.1.1 DNS service. Other similar services and Web browsers are yet to embrace the new protocol.

Moreover, one may need to wait for some time to see any mass adoption for the latest development.

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