Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure what timing attacks you are talking about. Having traffic analysis in your threat model is an extreme choice, typically it means your adversaries include law enforcement agencies or state-level actors. Sending DNS over VPN might just mean that you don’t trust your ISP and think they might intercept the request and forge a response—something which does happen, and I’ve personally observed it at two different…
It's not in my threat model per se, but it's something I give a lot of thought to because systems like this are expected to be used by political dissidents, whistleblowers and other persecuted individuals who are subject to such threat models. My ISP probably forges responses because they have no problem injecting html/js and hijacking ad space on unencrypted connections. As far as timing attacks, an example would be…
This is wrong, you should not expect political dissidents, whistleblowers, and other people in the same category to use similar techniques to protect themselves.
If you are protecting yourself from different threats, then it is not unreasonable to use different methods to protect yourself. There is an inherent tradeoff between security and usability. If law enforcement or state-level actors are in your threat model, you're going to have to make some extreme usability sacrifices just to keep yourself safe. That means using different systems than other people use.
> Even though you are at a coffee shop in an undisclosed location miles away from home, if LE has a reason to profile the IP you're broadcasting from at home they could do look at request times and try to link a request from the coffee shop to your home DNS server.
You're describing a different system. The system described by kingo555 is just for home.
> As far as timing attacks, an example would be such: Even though you are at a coffee shop in an undisclosed location miles away from home, if LE has a reason to profile the IP you're broadcasting from at home they could do look at request times and try to link a request from the coffee shop to your home DNS server.
That's just traffic analysis. The term "timing attack" refers to something else.
If you're a political dissident, whistleblower, or someone else with law enforcement / state-level actors in your threat model, everything changes. Presumably if you are worried about law enforcement, you put the VPN endpoint outside their jurisdiction. This can make it extremely difficult to do traffic analysis, depending on who your adversary is.
I think it makes sense that not everyone has law enforcement and state-level actors in their threat model.