1.1.1.1: How to use Cloudflare's DNS service to speed up and secure your internetAPNIC and CloudFlare announced the free 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver service, which is intended as a drop-in replacement to protect your privacy from providers.
By James Sanders | April 2, 2018, 5:35 AM PST
CloudFlare and APNIC are working together to run a free DNS routing service, as well as study DNS traffic to develop new mitigations for DNS-based attacks.
CloudFlare is touting the security aspects of the DNS resolver, noting that the company will not write querying IPs to disk, and will delete logs within 24 hours.
1.1.1.1: Cloudflare's new DNS attracting 'gigabits per second' of rubbishCloudflare's new Domain Name System promises to both speed up your internet access and protect your privacy.
By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for Networking | April 4, 2018
Cloudflare is an old hand at speeding up corporate internet services with its content delivery network (CDN). The company is also a pro at blocking Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Now, with its new 1.1.1.1 public Domain Name System (DNS) resolver, it can speed up and secure your web browsing, as well.
What is DNS and how does it work?
DNS is the Internet's master phone book. It turns human-readable domain names, such as cbsinteractive.com, into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses such as 64.30.228.118. For all practical purposes, every time you go anywhere on the internet, you start by interacting with DNS.
This takes time. A complex webpage can require multiple DNS lookups -- one for the text, another for an image, another for an ad on the page, and so on -- before your page loads. Each DNS lookup takes an average of 32 milliseconds (ms). That really slows down many websites. So, when you speed up your DNS lookups, you'll get faster internet performance.
There have been fast DNS services for years to help you. My favorites are Cisco OpenDNS and Google Public DNS. According to Olafur Gudmundsson, Cloudflare's director of engineering, Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 will be faster than the others because "we are already building data centers all over the globe to reduce the distance (i.e. latency) from users to content. Eventually we want everyone to be within 10 milliseconds of at least one of our locations."
Frankly, I have only the vaguest idea of what this all means, but it's free.Cloudflare is conducting an experiment with APNIC, and it's revealing plenty of dirty hacks.
By Stilgherrian for The Full Tilt | April 4, 2018
Cloudflare's new speed and privacy enhancing domain name system (DNS) servers, launched on Sunday, are also part of an experiment being conducted in partnership with the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC).
The experiment aims to understand how DNS can be improved in terms of performance, security, and privacy.
"We are now critically reliant on the integrity of the DNS, yet the details of the way it operates still remains largely opaque," wrote APNIC's chief scientist Geoff Huston in a blog post.
"We are aware that the DNS has been used to generate malicious denial of service attacks, and we are keen to understand if there are simple and widely deployable measures that can be taken to mitigate such attacks. The DNS relies on caching to operate efficiently and quickly, but we are still unsure as to how well caching actually performs. We are also unclear how much of the DNS is related to end user or application requirements for name resolution, and how much is related to the DNS chattering to itself."