Can my DNS provider be discovered by dnsleaktest.com?
Can the website dnsleaktest.com detect my DNS provider? Is there any way through which I can prevent them from doing so?
I was researching through its website to find out about DNS and I understood that DNS stands for Domain Name System and can be likened to the phone book of the internet. DNS servers are databases of all of the public domains on the internet. Users find domain names useful but browsers communicate via IP addresses. A DNS is responsible for translating the domain name into an IP address and the other way around so the proper content is loaded to your browser page.
From the source of dnsleaktest.com - https://www.dnsleaktest.com/:
That site generates a random host name and arranges for your browser to request content from that host name. Since the host name has never been served to anyone else before, your browser's request to resolve it is sure to make its way to the primary server for the dnsleaktest.com domain. Since they run their own DNS, whoever they receive the DNS requests from is your DNS provider. Whether forcing your DNS traffic to go through a tunnel instead of via your ISP depends on who you want privacy from. If you don't want the sites you visit to know where you're from, it's a mild leak: most sites don't bother to track where your DNS requests come from, and anyway they'd have a hard time figuring out which ones are yours, and your requests are likely to be served by some cache anyway. However any site could use the same trick as dnsleaktest if they cared. If you're using a tunnel because you don't want your ISP to know which sites you're visiting, making sure that no DNS request ever reaches your ISP is crucial.