Mozilla continues in its process of strengthening privacy of the users in your Firefox browser. A new component online privacy that the folks at Mozilla want to start adding at the end of this month after it is the DNS over HTTPS (DoH) protocol.
DNS over HTTPS will gradually become the default standard, starting with the US starting in late September, blocking much of web browsing without the need for explicit failover like before. DoH in Firefox it should make online browsing even more private and secure, with less monitoring activity.
In a blog post Mozilla said:
"After many experiments, we have shown that we have a reliable service with good performance, that we can detect and mitigate the main implementation problems, and that the majority of our users will benefit from the best protection of encrypted DNS traffic." . The company added: “We are confident that the default activation of DoH is the next step. When the DoH function is activated, users will be informed and will have the opportunity to unsubscribe «.
Since 2017, Mozilla has started working on the DoH protocol. And starting in June 2018, the company began testing the protocol with its browser to ensure excellent performance and user experience.
According to Mozilla, several users have not hesitated to adopt DoH in Firefox during testing.
"We were also surprised and excited by the more than 70,000 users who have already chosen to explicitly enable DoH in Firefox for the trial edition."
This upcoming deployment of DoH in Firefox is also motivated by the results of some research, according to the blog post.
Based on the reliable results obtained during your work with the DoH trial version and the results of your research, on your deployment plan.
The goal of this plan is ensure that changes do not extinguish initial protective measures of user.
In fact, in open traffic, IP addresses and browsing activities can be profiled and intercepted and manipulated queries. DoH protocol encrypts website addresses, bypasses local ISPs and connects directly to central name servers.
This means that traffic cannot be hijacked. But it also means that many of today's filtering and protection tools, usually managed by ISPs, will no longer work.
For this, all queries will not use HTTPS, according to Mozilla it is based on the "recovery" method that returns to the default DNS of the operating system if there is a specific need, such as some parental controls and certain commercial settings or an obvious search flaw.
Therefore, the choices of users and IT managers who need the new feature to be disabled will be honored, Mozilla said in its blog post.
Mozilla says it works with parental control providers and ISPs to make it work in practice.
The company will operate a system where such protections "will add a Canarian domain to its block lists." This means providing a deliberately blocked site to the lists that will alert Firefox, telling the browser that protection is in place so it can block DoH.
Recently, on September 4, Mozilla announced other privacy measures in the new version of its operating system. Mozilla's browser will now block third-party tracking cookies by default. This enhanced protection will be automatically enabled for all users.
Regarding the DoH, Mozilla says it will carry out a phased deployment in the United States "from the end of September."
As a first step, a smaller percentage of users will see the change, Mozilla will "monitor all issues" before the rollout is rolled out. "If all goes well," the company said, "we will let you know when we are ready for 100% implementation," he added. America is first, but the rest of the world can follow.
Source: https://blog.mozilla.org/