Measuring DoT/DoH Blocking Using OONI Probe: a Preliminary Study

We designed DNSCheck, an active network experiment to detect the blocking of DoT/DoH services. We implemented DNSCheck into OONI Probe, the network-interference measurement tool we develop since 2012. We compiled a list of popular DoT/DoH services and ran DNSCheck measurements with help from volunteer OONI Probe users. We present preliminary results from measurements in Kazakhstan (AS48716), Iran (AS197207), and China (AS45090). We tested 123 DoT/DoH services, corresponding to 461 TCP/QUIC endpoints. We found endpoints to fail or succeed consistently. In AS197207 (Iran), 50% of the DoT endpoints seem blocked. Otherwise, we found that more than 80% of the tested endpoints were always reachable. The most frequently blocked services are Cloudflare’s and Google’s. In most cases, attempting to reach blocked endpoints failed with a timeout. We observed timeouts connecting, during, and after the TLS handshake. TLS blocking depends on either the SNI or the destination endpoint.