On 4 October 2023, Cloudflare experienced DNS resolution problems. Some users may have received SERVFAIL DNS responses to valid queries. In this blog, we’re going to talk about what the failure was, why it occurred, and what we’re doing to make sure this doesn’t happen again
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 root of the DNS tree has been using DNSSEC to protect the zone content since 2010. DNSSEC is simply a mechanism to provide cryptographic signatures alongside DNS records that can be validated, i.e. prove the answer is correct and has not been tampered with.
Almost a year ago, we announced that we were going to stop answering DNS ANY queries. We were prompted by a number of factors: The lack of legitimate ANY use. The abundance of malicious ANY use. The constant use of ANY queries in large DNS amplification DDoS attacks.
DNS, one of the oldest technologies running the Internet, keeps evolving. There is a constant stream of new developments, from DNSSEC, through DNS-over-TLS, to a plentiful supply of fresh EDNS extensions.
CloudFlare is, arguably, the largest third-party DNS Authoritative operator in the world. We manage well over 1 million domains and have registrations in almost every TLD open for registrations.
I’ve been working on DNSSEC evolution for a long time as implementor, IETF working group chair, protocol experimenter, DNS operator, consultant, and evangelist.
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