Cloudflare and Apple have teamed up to develop a new internet protocol that’s intended to help fix security vulnerabilities on the internet that several people don’t know about its existence. The protocol is named Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH). The protocol is designed in such a way that it helps anonymize the data and makes it more complex for internet service providers to identify which websites you visit.
If this protocol is helpful or not for complete net privacy is something that we will be discussing later, but first, we need to know how regular DNS works and what Cloudflare has added.
How Regular DNS Works?
Essentially, DNS allows internet users to utilize the web without the need to remember the IP address of each site that users want to visit. While we type in a website’s name, your system or PC requests the DNS server to translate a name like “cloudhostnews.com” to its actual IP. The DNS server will respond to the request and your computer will load the website.
While we talk about the privacy of regular DNS, you may have observed that whoever operates the DNS are aware and keep track of weblogs. Usually, it is your ISP that runs that server, and they can sell weblogs to advertisers. And by introducing ODoH, Cloudflare is looking to solve the problem.
Working of ODoH?
The protocol works by adding a proxy server between you and the DNS server. The proxy then acts as a go-between, sending your requests to the DNS server, and giving its responses back without giving any idea of who inquired the data.
Nick Sullivan, Cloudflare’s head of research stated that ODoH is intended to separate the data about who is making the query and what the query is.
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