April 2, 2018

Cloudflare launches 1.1.1.1 DNS service

The launch aims to provide high speed, security & privacy to its users by partnering with APNIC.

domain registration

CDN company Cloudflare have released their own DNS resolver 1.1.1.1- a recursive DNS service to provide high speed and security to its users. With this launch, Cloudflare seeks to focus on the privacy aspect of its own DNS by aiming to wipe-off all logs of DNS queries within 24 hours.

Cloudflare say that DNS services are mainly provided by internet service providers in a bid to resolve domain names like Google.com to a real IP address. They also adhere to the fact that DNS servers provided by these service provider could be often slow and reliable.

By partnering with APNIC (Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre), Cloudflare say that they offered 1.1.1.1 as a dummy address to analyze the flood of traffic to the IP address. They also say that the DNS resolver 1.1.1.1 provides DNS privacy-protection mechanism to use between the stub and the recursive resolver.

Speaking about the partnering with APNIC, Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, 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.

In closing, Cloudflare said that DNS 1.1.1.1 resolver will also be supporting TLS and HTTPS queries and are expecting more support from browsers and operating systems for the protocol.