Cloudflare-DNS Resolver

What is a DNS Resolver?
Domain name resolvers are the names given to computers, commonly located with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or institutional networks that are used to respond to a user request to resolve a domain name. These computers translate a domain name into an IP address.


What is a Open DNS Resolver?
An Open DNS Resolver is any DNS resolver that is publicly accessible, and willing to resolve recursive queries for anyone on the internet. 


Who is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare, Inc. is a U.S. company that provides a content delivery network, DDoS mitigation, Internet security services and distributed domain name server services, sitting between the visitor and the Cloudflare user's hosting provider, acting as a reverse proxy for websites. Cloudflare's headquarters are in San Francisco, California, with additional offices in London, Singapore, Champaign, Austin, Boston and Washington, D.C.


What they say?
Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet and today we are releasing our DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1 - a recursive DNS service. With this offering, we’re fixing the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. The DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1, is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. The DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1, provides, on day-one, all defined and proposed DNS privacy-protection mechanisms for use between the stub resolver and recursive resolver. For those not familiar, a stub resolver is a component of your operating system that talks to the recursive resolver. By only using DNS Query Name Minimisation defined in RFC7816, DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1, reduces the information leaked to intermediary DNS servers, like the root and TLDs. That means that DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1, only sends just enough of the name for the authority to tell the resolver where to ask the next question.


The DNS Resolver, 1.1.1.1 is also supporting privacy-enabled TLS queries on port 853 (DNS over TLS), so we can keep queries hidden from snooping networks. Furthermore, by offering the experimental DoH (DNS over HTTPS) protocol, we improve both privacy and a number of future speedups for end users, as browsers and other applications can now mix DNS and HTTPS traffic into one single connection.


Visit the blog to learn more and give the open service a try today! We have tested this on our personal computers and found it to be a very lucrative alternative to other DNS Resolvers that are sluggish.