Cloudflare has launched its 1.1.1.1 privacy-first consumer DNS service that is said to speed up your internet connection and help keep it private. Anyone can use the DNS resolver and the company claims it to be “the Internet’s fastest, privacy-first consumer DNS service.”
DNS is an essential part of the internet and it is typically offered by internet service providers to resolve domain names into a real IP address that routers and switches understand. Since the DNS servers provided by ISPs are often slow and use the DNS servers to identify all sites that are visited and it presents privacy problems. With the same thought in mind, Cloudflare is focusing on privacy aspect of its own DNS service and promises to wipe all logs of DNS queries within 24 hours.
Cloudflare says that it has worked with APNIC to offer its DNS service through 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. Talking about it, 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 offers both DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS and the company says that with HTTPS support, it should see more browsers and operating systems support the protocol. It has a global response rate of 14ms making it the fastest when compared to 20ms for OpenDNS and 34ms for Google’s DNS.