What are DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS and how do they protect user privacy?

When you enter a website address in your browser, your computer sends a request to a DNS server to find out the IP address of this resource. By default, such requests are transmitted unencrypted via the UDP protocol. This means your provider, corporate network administrator, or an attacker who intercepted traffic can easily see which sites you visit, even if the traffic to the site itself is protected by the HTTPS protocol.

To solve this problem, DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS technologies were developed. They encrypt DNS queries, masking them as regular web traffic or sending them through a secure TLS connection. Thus, third-party observers only see that you have connected to a specific IP address, but cannot find out the specific domain names you requested.

To configure this protection on your device, you can use modern browsers or operating systems that support these protocols "out of the box." It is enough to specify a reliable public provider that supports DNS encryption, such as Cloudflare or NextDNS, in your connection settings.

The introduction of these technologies is an important step for comprehensive protection of your online privacy, especially when using untrusted networks or the public internet.