Hi,

Resolver policies typically describe operational rules, such as which data is 
collected and retained for how long etc. When a resolver offers filtering for 
ads, abuse, ... their policy ought to say something about this, such as how to 
unblock a benign domain that was flagged in error.

Now, block-list-based filtering is one thing. For resolvers like DNS4EU which 
(will) employ heuristic, prediction-based filtering, a new type of error source 
appears, namely false categorization from prediction.

I think that the resolver policy should say what's an acceptable false positive 
rate for such filtering. The problem is, how do you measure that?

At a given time, one might not know which names would be blocked by the 
classifier (until someone asks). So you can't go and check the list for false 
positives, because there's no list.


Then, how to define a false positive rate?

Look at all blocked queries, and do a post-hoc investigation?

How about popularity -- should one factor in that blocking *.ddns.net is more 
severe than blocking *.blank.page? I.e., is it a ratio of blocked/total 
queries, or blocked/total names?

Or, wait for complaints, and somehow relate the complaints to the number of queries, i.e. 
take "complaints per 1M (blocked?) queries" or something? (That would not 
exactly be a false positive rate, but it *might* somewhat correlate.)

One may also not compute a ratio at all, and just count complaints (and define 
an acceptable threshold per day). -- Such a count would have to scale with the 
user base.


Questions over questions. Is there best practice on this? What do other 
resolver operators do?

In any case, I want to collect input and feed this back to the DNS4EU 
consortium, to make sure that *some* level of quality is committed to.

Thanks,
Peter

--
https://desec.io/
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