The IETF is not only a place to discuss the development of Internet protocols, but also offers a place for developers and operators to ‘eat their own dog food’ on the meeting network. And given that the IETF DPRIVE Working Group has published some RFC specifications over the past year, the most recent IETF 99 in Prague provided a timely opportunity to run an experimental DNS-over-TLS service.
DNS queries and responses are currently transmitted over the Internet entirely in the clear, and whilst DNSSEC is able to authenticate a response from a DNS server, it does not actually encrypt the transmitted information. The aim of DPRIVE is therefore to add mechanisms to provide confidentiality to DNS transactions and address concerns about pervasive monitoring using TLS or DTLS to encrypt queries and responses between DNS clients and servers.
Some information about how the experimental DNS-over-TLS service was set-up on the IETF network can be found on the IETF99 Experiments page, but the DNS Privacy Project offers a list of experimental servers supporting both IPv4 and IPv6 if you want to try this out yourself. You also can check out their up status.