1.1.1.1: the Fastest, Privacy-first Consumer DNS Service
The problem is that these DNS services are often slow and not privacy respecting. What many Internet users don’t realize is that even if you’re visiting a website that is encrypted — has the little green lock in your browser — that doesn’t keep your DNS resolver from knowing the identity of all the sites you visit. That means, by default, your ISP, every wifi network you’ve connected to, and your mobile network provider have a list of every site you’ve visited while using them.
[…]
But it’s been depressing to us to watch all too frequently how DNS can be used as a tool of censorship against many of the groups we protect. While we’re good at stopping cyber attacks, if a consumer’s DNS gets blocked there’s been nothing we could do to help.
[…]
We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system. They thought it was a laudable goal. 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.
I just checked 1.1.1.1’s performance and it appears to be the fastest DNS out there, avergaing 14.01 ms worldwide and 11.34 ms in Europe over the last 30 days. Google’s
8.8.8.8and4.4.4.4is significantly slower, clocking in at 34.51 ms and 24.43 ms respectively.
See also: Google Public DNS.
Update (2018-04-22): See also: Glenn Fleishman.
3 Comments RSS · Twitter
Nice. I look forward to giving this a spin later today. My daughter and I needed a tech class for the day, so revisiting DNS makes a lot of sense. It underpins pretty much everything we do on the Internet. I'm pretty excited. No joke.
So far, seems fine. I'm not sure if I'm noticing the "super speeds" but I am intrigued by the other potential advantages.
Has been working great with dnscrypt-proxy for some time now (using DoH = DNS-over-HTTPS). One big advantage is also that the Cloudflare servers are all over the globe. VPN tunnel to Stockholm? Cloudflare DNS right next door.
Next step: ODNS (hopefully).