Internet giant Google has announced that its public DNS service now supports DNS-over-TLS. Now that means Android 9 users can use it as the system-wide DNS service on the device.
You might be wondering what DNS means. DNS stands for Domain Name System and can be described as the phonebook or phone directory of the Internet. This is how it works; whenever we want to access web information via domain names like www.techfoe.com, www.google.com etc, we type the name of the domain we want to visit.
It doesn't stop there. The web browsers that we want to visit won't understand our request because they interact via Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to load Internet resources. Now, the DNS service is what translate the domain to an IP address for it to be readable by the Web browser(s).
"Starting today, users can secure queries between their devices and Google Public DNS with DNS-over-TLS, preserving their privacy and integrity," the Google post read.
The later went on to explain how Google has "implemented the DNS-over-TLS specification along with the RCF 7766 recommendations to minimize the overhead of using TLS. These include support for TLS 1.3 (for faster connections and improved security), TCP fast open, and pipelining of multiple queries and out-of-order responses over a single connection. All of this is deployed with Google's serving infrastructure which provides reliable and scalable management for DNS-over-TLS connections."
AdGuard in December also launched it's own DNS service, after running the beta service for over 2 years. The service also had support for Android 9 devices too.
Google made a well detailed instructions on how to configure this feature on Android. Click here to view.