this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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Pihole's act as a DNS or "Dynamic Name Server". All internet traffic is IP based once it leaves your home because routers dont know how to forward traffic for "https://samsung-ad-hell.com/", so there is a dedicated kind of packet for "Where is https://samsung-ad-hell.com/ located?" and that is a DNS Lookup. The Pihole pretends to know because it maintains a list of bad urls that host websites that only support privacy exploitation and advertisements and tells them "oh you want to go to 0.0.0.0, that's where you'll find your stuff" as it snickers.
But DNS Lookups were always plain text. When your laptop says "Where is https://big-booties.com/" your ISP knows you want porn. Now there is a new variant called "Secure DNS Lookup" which encrypts the url you're asking about. The ISP knows you're asking for a domain's IP, but it can't know which one and it no longer cares. Neat.
The trouble is that the Pi-Hole can no longer protect us from all the stupid fucking smart devices that want to earn a fraction of a penny per device by spying on us because THEY use the new Secure DNS Lookup.
It's not a huge issue, you need a DoH resolver now (e.g. your browser which has a secure connection to a secure DNS server) which cannot block from requesting the ad, but can definitely block from displaying it once the domain resolves.
Extra overhead though, agreed
Wow really? I was under the impression that the SSL part would prevent the pihole from being able to spoof itself as a legitimate DNS
Not to be pedantic, but a pihole is legitimate DNS. Being able to do your own DNS has always been a fundamental part of the Internet Protocol, and is used a lot in enterprise to handle name resolution for internal subnets and stuff like that.
Being pedantic is totally OK here - we're talking about SSL's spoof protection. I'll have to look up how any rando can host a DNS that supports DNS/HTTPS when a system would be expecting a valid SSL cert that declares who it was issued to and by whom and the requester is expecting a particular whom.
unbound, bind, or if you want a gui then technitium DNS.
but this thread is so, so full of misinfo. you don't need a local doh capable DNS server at home. having one won't solve anything either, because your advertising fridge won't be using it. that's the actual problem. you need to block any doh servers that the fridge might access (and regular DNS servers too), so that it doesn't have a choice but respect your pihole, but that is very difficult because doh traffic looks like regular web traffic (because it is). yeah the fridge does not need to load websites, but it does all its questionably useful functions through HTTPS APIs too, so if you want to give it internet, you can't just block web traffic for it.
SSL operates after name resolution. It's one way that information about your browsing habits is not protected by application-layer encryption; the domains you're visiting are available to your DNS server.
Unless you're using DNS over TLS!
Or DNS over https, but that's kind of gross.
No, you misunderstood the parent comment. Your connection to the DNS server being encrypted doesn't change the fact that the DNS server knows the domains you are resolving
Interesting... Well, this prompted me to search what Pi-Hole has done for this, and they seem to have a way to continue blocking even DoH, using "cloudfared", which is another daemon that needs to run with Pi-Hole... They can't possibly think their enshittification will continue to work.