Your smart home is bypassing Pi-hole with encrypted DNS, and here's how to stop it
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Some smart home and IoT devices bypass Pi-hole by using encrypted DNS (DoH/DoT), sending queries directly to resolvers like Google or Cloudflare over HTTPS instead of through Pi-hole. The author discovered this by capturing traffic with tcpdump and Wireshark, finding TLS connections to 8.8.8.8 that Pi-hole never saw. The fix involves using firewall rules (DNAT) to redirect all DNS traffic back to Pi-hole, and blocking outbound port 853 to shut down DoT. While encrypted DNS is a legitimate privacy feature on untrusted networks, hard-coded firmware settings undermine home network DNS infrastructure.
Table of contents
Your gadgets have their own DNS settingsForcing gadgets to use Pi-hole via firewallEncrypted DNS was supposed to be a good thing190 Impressions