Show HN: From “apps doing DNS” to websites doing their own DNS

2 points

6 years ago

There's been a lot of talk recently about "apps doing DNS", where every application on your computer could be talking to it's own DNS resolver. This is because of the somewhat recent 2018 protocol, DNS queries over HTTPS (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8484). Turns out that with DoH, not only can every application do it's own DNS -- essentially every website you visit could be using whatever DoH resolver they want when fetching external resources that require a DNS lookup. That means stylesheets, scripts, images, etc, call all be loaded from whatever domain without going through your default DNS resolver. For a lot of people, that might be disturbing. For others, that might be super useful. Other might not care.

I'm personally still unsure of how to feel about it. I see some possible benefits, and also some privacy concerns. With all that in mind, I decided to make a JavaScript library a few months ago to make it easy to do DNS lookups from within web apps. It's called DoHjs (super creative name, I know). You can check it out on Github - https://github.com/byu-imaal/dohjs. There's also a page you can try sending DNS queries directly from the browser from called https://dohjs.org. It's far from production ready, but it's got some really cool features right now with more coming soon!

I'd love to hear some thoughts/feedback - could be about DoHjs, websites doing DNS, DoH in general. I suspect many will be interested to use DoHjs, perhaps for different purposes than bypassing people's default DNS resolvers. Feel free to comment here what you think, or open up an issue on Github if that makes more sense.

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