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The Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the most crucial parts of the Internet. Although the original standard defined the usage of DNS over UDP (DoUDP) as well as DNS over TCP (DoTCP), UDP has become the predominant protocol used in the DNS. With the introduction of new Resource Records (RRs), the sizes of DNS responses have increased considerably. Since this can lead to truncation or IP fragmentation , the fallback to DoTCP as required by the standard ensures successful DNS responses by overcoming the size limitations of DoUDP. However, the effects of the usage of DoTCP by stub resolvers are not extensively studied to this date. We close this gap by presenting a view at DoTCP from the Edge, issuing 12.1M DNS requests from 2,500 probes toward Public as well as Probe DNS recursive resolvers. In our measurement study, we observe that DoTCP is generally slower than DoUDP, where the relative increase in Response Time is less than 37% for most resolvers. While optimizations to DoTCP can be leveraged to further reduce the response times, we show that support on Public resolvers is still missing, hence leaving room for optimizations in the future. Moreover, we also find that Public resolvers generally have comparable reliability for DoTCP and DoUDP. However, Probe resolvers show a significantly different behavior: DoTCP queries targeting Probe resolvers fail in 3 out of 4 cases, and, therefore, do not comply with the standard. This problem will only aggravate in the future: As DNS response sizes will continue to grow, the need for DoTCP will solidify.

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Over the last decade, Web traffic has significantly shifted towards HTTPS due to an increased awareness for privacy. However, DNS traffic is still largely unencrypted, which allows user profiles to be derived from plaintext DNS queries. While DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH) address this problem by leveraging transport encryption for DNS, both protocols are constrained by the underlying transport (TCP) and encryption (TLS) protocols, requiring multiple round-trips to establish a secure connection. In contrast, QUIC combines the transport and cryptographic handshake into a single round-trip, which allows the recently standardized DNS over QUIC (DoQ) to provide DNS privacy with minimal latency. In the first study of its kind, we perform distributed DoQ measurements across multiple vantage points to evaluate the impact of DoQ on Web performance. We find that DoQ excels over DoH, leading to significant improvements with up to 10% faster loads for simple webpages. With increasing complexity of webpages, DoQ even catches up to DNS over UDP (DoUDP) as the cost of encryption amortizes: With DoQ being only ∼2% slower than DoUDP, encrypted DNS becomes much more appealing for the Web.

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