Malaysia backtracks on DNS redirection decision

https://thesun.my/local-news/mcmc-asked-not-to-proceed-with-dns-redirection-method-fahmi-LN12977194

by yen223 • 2 years ago

86 44 2 years ago

Shank• 2 years ago

A rare move showing grace on behalf of the government, but the fact that the decision was made first, followed subsequently by a backtrack is still alarming.

usrnm• 2 years ago

It costs very little to try and see if it works out, they will try again shortly. You can see the same bahavior with chat regulatons in the EU.

carstenhag• 2 years ago

Same as with preemptive governmental data storage, which gets warmed up about every year in Germany...

nucleative• 2 years ago

I'm an American working from Thailand for the past decade or so, and this strategy is relatively common for the governments around here.

It's chaotic. They will usually have mid level officials announce some new policy as if it's a done deal.

Then, if there's no public outcry, a higher level official will confirm it and maybe, eventually, details will roll out.

If the public responds very negatively, the idea will just disappear or the higher level guy can distance himself from the low level guy "who was misinformed".

I think it's how they test the water and decide if it's worth the effort.

aussieguy1234• 2 years ago

While they've backtracked, every dictator in the world probably took notice and its only a matter of time.

MonkeyClub• 2 years ago

Greece is already way ahead!

When one tries to visit some sites like LibGen, DNS is redirected to a "no-no you shouldn't go there" page, which in turn redirects to this official finger-wagging page: https://opi.gr/edppi_block/edppi_block.html

DNS hijacking was also used during the beginning of the Ukraine affair as part of an EU-wide censorship push, blocking sites like the Kremlin and Pravda, though without further redirection.

skrause2• 2 years ago

We're talking about two different issues though:

1. Blocking or redirecting some pages when using the ISP's DNS server. This is what you're talking about. The workaround is to use a third party DNS resolver.

2. Intercepting all unencrypted DNS traffic to any DNS server and redirecting it to the ISPs' DNS servers. This is what Malaysia was planning to do.

mytailorisrich• 2 years ago

Not a very good example as LibGen is blocked by court decisions in a number of countries because of copyright infringement issues.

It's even been ordered to close by a US court (according to Wikipedia). Obviously they ignored that as they are not in the US...

sunaookami• 2 years ago

As is Germany with the "CUII" where every relevant ISP DNS-blocks "copyright-violating" sites without a court decision. And of course EU-wide where f.e. RT is blocked (not vetoed by a court or parliament).

kelnos• 2 years ago

Malaysia is hardly the first country to (try to) pull this. I'm sure all those other dictators already know about this move.

kome• 2 years ago

Can DNS-over-HTTPS help to avoid this?

tedk-42• 2 years ago

Yes, assuming you have a non compromised browser or certificate trust chain

commandersaki2• 2 years ago

Tangential question: how are IP addresses in certificates validated? Cloudflare was subject to a BGP hijack of the 1.1.1/24 prefix, how does it prevent someone from running a malicious DNS server?

dist-epoch2• 2 years ago

I tried using DNS-over-HTTPS with Cloudflare/Google DNS on a Ubuntu VM at the system level and I had problems. So I disabled it.

Not sure if it's a problem with my setup or if it's not very robust in general.

SkyBlueSerenity• 2 years ago

Depends on ISP. Earlier this week before today’s u-turn:

-Digi redirected ALL traffics on destination port 53 to their own DNS server. Thus DoH unaffected.

-Maxis redirected traffics from some mainstream public DNS servers (Google, Cloudflare, Quad9) on destination port 53 to their own DNS server. Thus DoH unaffected.

-TM is the most evil, they redirected traffics from some mainstream public DNS servers (Google, Cloudflare, Quad9) on all ports to its own DNS server. DoH and DoT failed due to certificate error.

consumerx• 2 years ago

LOL

slurpyb• 2 years ago

The advertisements on this website gives me a panic attack

defrost4• 2 years ago

While the DNS Privacy Project has a good many suggestions and links it might be time to upgade their "stubby" project.

https://dnsprivacy.org/

stubby is a localhost DNS proxy that can work for any app | browser | etc. on a network and use DoT or DoH to any of the common providers.

Given the ease with which national ISPs can MiTM these | intercept calls to Cloudflare | Quad9 | AdGuard etc. it might be good to extend either stubby or it's docs to let people know how to use it access | establish a much broader DNS proxy network to allow for indirect non obvious lookups.

netsharc• 2 years ago

Off-topic: Why are you using | instead of / ?

People having their unique implementation of punctuation marks irks me...

oarsinsync• 2 years ago

At a guess, because regex and/or coding generally. In a number of regex implementations and programming languages, | is used as an inclusive OR

defrost4• 2 years ago

Because I've used it as an "or" symbol in a non unique common as muck manner since 1980 at least when I was taught Boolean logic in an undergraduate university mathematics class.

It's one of many conventional symbols for OR, more common in the pure ASCII days due to a lack of ∧ , ∨ , ¬ et al.

Which rock have you lived under that you've never seen it used an OR before?

People imposing their limited experience of the wide world upon others would certainly irk some, but rest easy, I've not taken offence at your odd assumption of non existent universal convention.

inkyoto• 2 years ago

There is a lot of confusion in this thread and in a separate thread discussing the Malaysian DNS redirect legislation where people confound privacy with resistance to censorship. Whilst both do possess a certain degree of overlap, resistance to censorship requires a fundamentally different approach that does not fit within constraints of the DNS framework.

DNS has a decentralised architecture designed to be resilient to failures.

DoT, DoH and similar address the privacy aspect of the unencrypted by default DNS traffic.

None of the existing DNS, DNS extensions, DoT, DoH can circumvent serious censorship attempts at scale due to name resolution requests being encapsulated in an IP packet that exposes enough metadata that (destination address and port number) to allow the packet to be altered, redirected, dropped or blackholed even if the packet is encrypted or obfuscated. Traffic bound to a specific IP address or to a specific TCP or UDP port is the easiest to curb, it does not even require the manual intervention and is widely used by intrusion detection systems to automatically block the detected in real time malicious traffic.

The censorship resistance requires a complete replacement of DNS that would be akin to the GNU Naming System[0], which fulfils all three objectives: it is a decentralised, privacy-preserving, censorship-resistant domain name resolution protocol.

Having gone through https://dnsprivacy.org/ (which is very disorganised, to be fair), I fail to see how stubby could be of any help due to still requiring a upstream DNS server of sorts somewhere, which will be blocked if not automatically then very quickly albeit manually anyway.

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9498

defrost4• 2 years ago

which is very disorganised, to be fair
I fail to see how stubby could be of any help

I agree fully with the first, partially agree with the second; the DNSPrivacy site needs an overhaul and seems a few years out of date but it does cover most of the privacy related lurks.

As you said the "stubby" | "getdns" module is good enough for privacy, it's no more than a local service shim layer between anything local requiring DNS via a variety of means, all of which can be censored.

I did suggest it could use extension .. and a network of distributed peers to extend to.

It's a project for anyone minded to take it up .. create a secure obfuscated distributed stubby net that can try DoT DoH etc in situ and should they work provide that service to others else fallover to reaching out to others to find peers that can access authorised DNS.

The Windows Portmaster project is an interesting one; it provides a level of network inspection and control to advanced regular users, stubby-like getdns functionality that's a bit easier to use, and offers a VPN layer to subscribers for data.

If the Portmaster maintainers are true to their vision I can see them adding obfuscated distributed DNS to subscribers in the near to mid future depending how they allocate resources and who they onboard now they have funds for a new hire (last I checked, I could be out of date here).

Euphorbium• 2 years ago

Can they selectively do it to just the ones that matter to them, and be undetectable this way?

nubinetwork2• 2 years ago

Past discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41471510

csomar• 2 years ago

He stressed that cybercrime issues, including access to gambling, prostitution and pornography websites, are extremely concerning and demand comprehensive solutions

They are not exactly backtracking but it seems that some of the involved parties didn't like the solution proposed (DNS redirection) and want to discuss other alternatives.

jusepal• 2 years ago

I'm currently in Malaysia. TM, the biggest public facing ISP here goes a step further by also ssl mitm-ing Google dns and Cloudflare dns DoH endpoint. Their idea is to hijack and route all query intended for both to their own DoH server. Obviously browsers showed big red warning about the attack since users explicitly setup their browser to use Google or Cloudflare DoH but instead being hijacked and routed to TM's own DoH endpoint. The whole ordeal is so baffling, i wonder which senior network admin at TM give that a go, or whether TM actually got competent network admin at all.

With that single misstep, suddenly the people realized if they could (and did) mitm Google and Cloudflare dns endpoint, they could mitm Gmail, Outlook, Riotgames, Facebook, Tiktok or whatever too. Public outcry comes pouring in and the Minister of Comm backtracked.

Malaysia backtracks on DNS redirection decision

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