DoT Implementation Status
This table lists the best understanding of the current status of DNS-over-TLS related features in the latest stable releases of a selection of standalone open source DNS software.
Also see DNS Privacy Clients for a full list of OS, mobile apps, routers and browsers that support DoT.
If there are errors or glaring omission please email sara@sinodun.com
Also see guides on how to use NGINX and other proxies to provide DNS-over-TLS, also see here.
This works with a couple of provisos:
- Be aware that a client will think it is talking to a DNS-over-TLS server and so may keep connections open when idle even when not using EDNS0 Keepalive (as allowed by RFC7858 ). The nameserver will see only TCP connections which were historically used just for one-shot TCP and may not be robust to many long-lived connections.
- Therefore this will work much better if the nameserver has robust TCP capabilities (as described in Sections 6.2.2 and 10 of RFC7766), and would be required for production level service. Any server that fully implements EDNS0 Keepalive (RFC7828) should meet this criteria.
See the DNS Privacy Reference Material page for more details on the individual features.
Clients/Forwarders
| Mode | Stub | Caching forwarder/proxy | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Software | (drill) | digit | (Stubby) | BIND (dig) | Go DNS | Knot (kdig) | Unbound | BIND | Knot Res | dndist | |
| General | Send ECS with SOURCE PREFIX-LENGTH value of 0 |  | | | |||||||
TCP/TLS Features | TCP fast open(b) | |
| | | | |||||
| Connection reuse (Q/R, Q/R, Q/R) | |
| | | | | | | | ||
Pipelining of queries(Q,Q,Q,R,R,R) | n/a | |
| | | | | | | | |
| Process OOOR (Q1,Q2,R2,R1) | n/a | |
| | | | | ||||
| EDNS0 Keepalive(c) | | | (f) | ||||||||
TLS Features | TLS encryption (Port 853) | | | | | | | | |||
| TLS authentication | | | | | | ||||||
| EDNS0 Padding | | | | | | | |||||
| TLS DNSSEC Chain Extension(h) | |||||||||||
Servers
| Mode | Load Balancer | Recursive | Auth | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Software | dnsdist | BIND | Knot Res | CoreDNS(e) | Tenta(e) | NSD | BIND | Knot Auth | ||
| General | QNAME minimisation | n/a | | | | |||||
TCP/TLS Features | TCP fast open(b) | | | | | | | | ||
Process Pipelined queries | | | | | | | | |||
| Provide OOOR | (g) | | | | n/a | n/a | n/a | |||
| EDNS0 Keepalive(c) | | | | | ||||||
TLS Features | TLS encryption (Port 853) | | | | | | | | ||
| Provide TLS auth credentials | | | | | | | ||||
| EDNS0 Padding (basic) | | | | | ||||||
| TLS DNSSEC Chain Extension(h) | ||||||||||
KEY:
- Green square - indicates latest release already supports this functionality
- Blue square - indicates that a patch is available in our git repo. See here for details: DNS-over-TLS patches
- Yellow square - indicates work in progress, or availabe in next release
- P - Requires building against a patched version of libunbound
(a) getdns uses libunbound in recursive mode
(b) not yet available on Windows
(c) Implies robust TCP connection management (see RFC7828 and RFC7766)
(e) Full list of supported features to be confirmed
(f) Can be added to queries but the response is currently ignored.
(g) Supports OOOR but could be limited by the nameserver or configuration used for recursion.
(h) This is no longer an active draft in the TLS working group.
Note pipelining and OOOP are not applicable for synchronous applications.
Other implementation work
- There is also a RUST implementation of a DNS client/server in development that supports DNS-over-TLS.
- Also see the Technitium DNS Server project project (supports DoT and DoT), source code is on Github).
DOH Implementation status
The picture for DOH implementation is move very rapidly. Some work to date
See the list of implementations maintained on the curl github site:
- Browsers and Clients
- Tools including various proxies (client and server) e.g dnscrypt-proxy, Facebooks experimental DoH proxy
- For work done at the IETF 101 Hackathon see the DOH Hackathon presentation
- We also maintain a list of some DOH clients (includes web browsers)
- And below is the state of DoH implementation is well know open-source DNS recursive resolvers/load-balancers
| Mode | Load Balancer | Recursive | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Software | dnsdist | Unbound | BIND | Knot Res | |
| DoH support | | | WIP (H1 2021) | | |
XFR/XoT Implementation status
This table is a work in progress - please notify us it updates/corrections are needed
This table reflects some of the current behaviour on implementations and also some features proposed in draft-ietf-dprive-xfr-over-tls. It is noted that some name servers will behave differently when starting up and first loading zones to steady state behaviour.
| Feature | BIND | NSD | Knot Auth | PowerDNS | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Features applicable to Secondary | Sec | Pri | Sec | Pri | Sec | Pri | Sec | Pri |
TCP: Typically performs AXFRs for different | ||||||||
| TCP: Typically performs IXFRs in parallel to AXFRs to the same primary using separate connections (in steady state) | ||||||||
| TCP: Connection re-use for XFRs to same primary is possible | (a) | |||||||
| TCP: When re-using connections, will pipeline all XFR requests | ||||||||
| Handle empty AXFR responses | ||||||||
| Supports XoT | (g) | (f) | ||||||
| Feature applicable to Primary | ||||||||
Handle pipelined XFR requests on one | (b) | |||||||
| Always sends AXFR responses for different zones serially on the same connection (not intermingled) | ||||||||
Sends all AXFR/IXFR responses serially | (d) | (b) | ||||||
| Handle sequential XFR requests on one connection for the same zone | (c) | |||||||
| Default size of XFR response | ~20kB | 16kB | Up to | 4-8kB | ||||
| Explicit configuration limit on num of concurrent XFRs | (e) | (e) | (e) | |||||
| Supports XoT | (g) | |||||||
KEY:
- Green square - indicates latest release supports this functionality
- Blue square - indicates that a patch or PR is available
- Yellow square - indicates work in progress, or available in next release.
- Red square - not tested yet, or cannot be tested.
(a) Current release will re-use connections if the max outgoing TPC connections is hit. This PR provides a configuration option to make that behaviour the default.
(b) NSD does not support IXFR as a primary
(c) Because NSD requires a reload to update a zone, an old version of the zone will currently be sent on a TCP connection opened before the reload. A fix/workaournd is proposed.
(d) e.g. If BIND receives an IXFR request whilst sending a large AXFR response, it will send the IXFR response immediately intermingled with the AXFR response.
(e) Whilst there is no limit explicitly for XFRs, the primary has a configuration option to limit the total number of incoming TCP connections
(defaults for relevant limits are: BIND - 25, NSD - 100, Knot - one half of the file descriptor limit for the server process, - PowerDNS 20
(f) See the PR.
(g) See this issue for progress.
4 Comments
Anonymous
According to http://ftp.isc.org/isc/bind9/9.12.0b1/RELEASE-NOTES-bind-9.12.0b1.html Bind 9.12 should support EDNS0 Padding Option. Not market yellow with "9.12" in table bind in recursive mode.
Sara Dickinson
Thanks for spotting - fixed!
Anonymous
What do the asterisks on "TCP fast open**" and "EDNS0 Keepalive***" indicate?
Sara Dickinson
They should have been (b) and (c) as in the top table. Fixed and thanks.