Web Privacy By Design: Evaluating Cross-layer Interactions of QUIC, DNS and H/3

• Published in: 2023 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking) pp. 1 - 9
• Main Authors: Sengupta, Jayasree, Kosek, Mike, Fries, Justus, Dikshit, Pratyush, Bajpai, Vaibhav
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IFIP 12.06.2023
• Subjects: Costs; Cross layer design; DNS; HTTP/3; Internet; Privacy; Protocols; QUIC; Systems engineering and theory; Web
• ISSN: 1861-2288
• DOI: 10.23919/IFIPNetworking57963.2023.10186362

Every Web session involves a DNS resolution. While, in the last decade, we witnessed a promising trend towards an encrypted Web in general, DNS encryption has only recently gained traction with the standardisation of DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH). Meanwhile, the rapid rise of QUIC deployment has now opened up an exciting opportunity to utilise the same protocol to not only encrypt Web communications, but also DNS. In this paper, we evaluate this benefit of using QUIC to coalesce name resolution via DNS over QUIC (DoQ), and Web content delivery via HTTP/3 (H3) with 0-RTT. We compare this scenario using several possible combinations where H3 is used in conjunction with DoH and DoQ, as well as the unencrypted DNS over UDP (DoUDP). We observe, that when using H3 1-RTT, page load times with DoH can get inflated by >30% over fixed-line and by >50% over mobile when compared to unencrypted DNS with DoUDP. However, this cost of encryption can be drastically reduced when encrypted connections are coalesced (DoQ + H3 0-RTT), thereby reducing the page load times by 1/3 over fixed-line and 1/2 over mobile, overall making connection coalescing with QUIC the best option for encrypted communication on the Internet.