Secrets Best Not Shared: DNS Privacy Enhancements for the Constrained IoT

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 8 Jun 2026] Secrets Best Not Shared: DNS Privacy Enhancements for the Constrained IoT Martine S. Lenders, Thomas C. Schmidt, Matthias Wählisch Attackers often identify DNS traffic to disrupt or compromise Internet services. While prior work has focused on encrypting queries using DNS over TLS, HTTPS, or QUIC to counter such attacks, we consider IETF protocols designed for resource-constrained IoT devices and empirically analyze the potential of obfuscating DNS traffic in addition to encryption. We create a dataset of machine-to-machine-compatible data objects along with the corresponding DNS resolution processes, evaluating 296 deployment scenarios of resolving host names, including DNS over the Constrained Application Layer Protocol (CoAP) and an onion routing flavor of CoAP under varying link-layer conditions. We compare them to DNS over HTTPS. Using Random Forest and a header field analysis, we identify fields that leak most information. Our findings show that DNS over CoAP with equalized packet lengths, block-wise transfer, and header compression reduces the accuracy of identifying DNS frames to 86% and further to 77% with payload compression. Our approach outperforms DNS over HTTPS, where classifiers always identify DNS frames based on IP addresses. The dataset is publicly available. Comments: 20 pages, 20 figures, 2 tables Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) Cite as: arXiv:2606.10097 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.10097v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.10097 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Martine Sophie Lenders [view email] [v1] Mon, 8 Jun 2026 19:22:30 UTC (3,581 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.NI References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)