Cloudflare is launching its customer DNS service today, on April Fools’ Day. The company says that it produce speedy and private internet connection with a promise to wipe off all logs of DNS queries in 24 hours. The service makes use of https://1.1.1.1 which may come as a surprise but it is an actual DNS resolver. According to Cloudflare, it will be “the Internet’s fastest, privacy-first consumer DNS service.”
DNS services are generally provided by internet service providers in a bid to resolve domain names such as Google.com into real IP addresses that routers and switches understand. it is essential for internet, however, DNS servers rendered by ISPs are usually slow and unreliable. ISPs or other Wi-Fi networks use DNS servers to identify all sites visited by people thus creating privacy problems. DNS also played an important role in helping Turkish citizens avoid a Twitter ban.
Cloudflare has once worked with APNIC to offer its DNS service through 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. A lot of people have used 1.1.1.1 as a dummy address and APNIC have before now tried to analyze the flood of traffic to the IP address and been overwhelmed. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said, “We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system. We offered Cloudflare’s network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs. And, with that, 1.1.1.1 was born.”
Cloudflare’s DNS will offer support for both DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS. It hopes that its HTTPS support will cause more browsers and operating systems to support the protocol. Its DNS is presently at a global response time of 14ms in contrast with OpenDNS 20ms and Google’s DNS 34ms.
This is not the first time that Cloudflare has aided with web services. A few years ago, it deployed its Universal SSL feature to provide free SSL encryption to multiple websites and the company is also known for rendering DDoS protection to prevent sites from being submerged under serious traffic.
