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by moparisthebest 2640 days ago
Same reason as DoH (DNS Queries over HTTP), but with better:

1. performance: since the TCP+TLS handshake is only performed once and the connection is kept open forever

2. privacy: the resolver doesn't get the requesting party's IP address
1 comments
amelius 2640 days ago
> privacy: the resolver doesn't get the requesting party's IP address

How does that work? Is it somewhat like Tor?

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mgliwka 2640 days ago
The resolver is a client of an XMPP server and might be on the same server or even a different server the requesting party is on.

[Requesting Party]<--->[XMPP server]<--->[XMPP Server]<--->[Resolver]

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amelius 2640 days ago 

    [Requesting Party]<--->[XMPP server1]<--->[XMPP Server2]<--->[Resolver]
But do I need to trust XMPP server 1 and 2?

And will XMPP server 2 have my IP address?

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SamWhited 2640 days ago
> But do I need to trust XMPP server 1 and 2?

You trust whatever server you query. That might be server one, or it might be server one and server two. It's a federated network, so you make requests through your own server.

> And will XMPP server 2 have my IP address?

No. It's a federated network, like email, so it just gets your XMPP address (historically referred to as a "Jabber ID" or "JID").

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tgragnato 2640 days ago
XMPP is not e2ee, the second server gets your JID (but not your IP, supposing your client doesn't leak it): you need to trust the servers (1, 2 and the resolver).

Also; you don't get virtual circuits, but the performance should be superior. Tor only supports A, AAAA and PTR; DoX supports every record type.

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moparisthebest 2640 days ago
You can connect to XMPP servers over tor, even host them on .onion addresses.

Also, XMPP has e2e extensions, at least one of which supports encrypting/verifying arbitrary XML[1], so if the resolver supported it, you could only trust the resolver. (also don't forget about DNSSEC which can be used to verify DNS responses too)

[1]: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0373.html

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tgragnato 2640 days ago
Agreed, the best case is when you have e2ee (which unfortunately is not in core) and DNSSEC.

I must admit to being biased against using DNSSEC alone because a malicious XMPP server can still inspect and/or modify queries and responses. By self-hosting you mitigate, but without e2ee the server is still trusted (in the threat-model).

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