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Comcast’s Xfinity Internet Service Joins Firefox’s Trusted Recursive Resolver Program
June 2020 by Marc Jacob
Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, and Comcast have announced Comcast as the first Internet Service Provider (ISP) to provide Firefox users with private and secure encrypted Domain Name System (DNS) services through Mozilla’s Trusted Recursive Resolver (TRR) Program. Comcast has taken major steps to protect customer privacy as it works to evolve DNS resolution.
For more than 35 years, DNS has served as a key mechanism for accessing sites and services on the internet. Functioning as the internet’s address book, DNS translates website names, like Firefox.com and xfinity.com, into the internet addresses that a computer understands so that the browser can load the correct website.
Over the last few years, Mozilla, Comcast, and other industry stakeholders have been working to develop, standardize, and deploy a technology called (DoH). DoH helps to protect browsing activity from interception, manipulation, and collection in the middle of the network by encrypting the DNS data.
Encrypting DNS data with DoH is the first step. A necessary second step is to require that the companies handling this data have appropriate rules in place – like the ones outlined in Mozilla’s TRR Program. This program aims to standardize requirements in three areas: limiting data collection and retention from the resolver, ensuring transparency for any data retention that does occur, and limiting any potential use of the resolver to block access or modify content. By combining the technology, DoH, with strict operational requirements for those implementing it, participants take an important step toward improving user privacy.
Comcast launched public beta testing of DoH in October 2019. Since then, the company has continued to improve the service and has collaborated with others in the industry via the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Encrypted DNS Deployment Initiative, and other industry organizations around the world. This collaboration also helps to ensure that users’ security and parental control functions that depend on DNS are not disrupted in the upgrade to encryption whenever possible. Also in October, Comcast announced a series of key privacy commitments, including reaffirming its longstanding commitment not to track the websites that customers visit or the apps they use through their broadband connections. Comcast also introduced a new Xfinity Privacy Center to help customers manage and control their privacy settings and learn about its privacy policy in detail.
Comcast is the latest resolver, and the first ISP, to join Firefox’s TRR Program, joining Cloudflare and NextDNS. Mozilla began the rollout of encrypted DNS over HTTPS (DoH) by default for US-based Firefox users in February 2020, but began testing the protocol in 2018.
Adding ISPs in the TRR Program paves the way for providing customers with the security of trusted DNS resolution, while also offering the benefits of a resolver provided by their ISP such as parental control services and better optimized, localized results. Mozilla and Comcast will be jointly running tests to inform how Firefox can assign the best available TRR to each user.
