Quad9 Brings Secure DNS to the Masses

An industry alliance has introduced Quad9, a free DNS service that can protect users from phishing, bots and malware websites.

Protecting DNS is critical. When DNS protects you and your business, its (potentially) amazing. Thats what a new service called Quad9 is about.
A joint project of the
Global Cyber Alliance
(GCA), IBM and
Packet Clearing House
,
Quad9
is a
free public DNS system
that prevents a user from ending up at a known bad site when they click on a link from an email, message or web page.
In order to determine which domains are bad, Quad9s DNS servers check each resolution request against the
IBM X-Force
threat intelligence database -- a database that Quad9 augments with data from 18 additional threat intelligent systems and threat intelligence fed back into the system from users who contribute incident reports.
Setting up the Quad9 service in an individual workstation or appliance is as simple as pointing the devices DNS requester to 9.9.9.9 -- hence the name of the service. In addition to the DNS resolution protection, Quad9 offers
DNSSEC
, which provides an encrypted root DNS signature to eliminate the possibilities of DNS poisoning or spoofing, which would send users to malicious web pages.
For those who have already embraced and implemented IPv6, Quad9 provides DNS servers at 2620:fe::fe.
In addition to the blacklists that Quad9 uses to block traffic, the service maintains a golden list of URLs that are never blocked -- a list that includes high-profile sites such as Google and Amazon.
Quad9 claims it doesnt keep records of individual requests, storing only anonymized geographical request locations so they can understand the geographical nature of threats. Privacy is mentioned frequently in the organizations literature and no PII is stored on its servers. In addition, Quad9s secure service does not forward
EDNS Client Subnet
information -- a partial address for the requesting device -- because they have determined that theres the potential for a privacy breach based on the information. While not forwarding EDNS Client Subnet information might cause a minor slowdown in returning address information, the group feels the privacy is worth the performance hit.
According to Quad9s website, Quad9 systems are distributed worldwide in more than 70 locations at launch, with more than 160 locations in total on schedule for 2018. These servers are located primarily at Internet Exchange points, meaning that the distance and time required to get answers is lower than almost any other solution. With a combination of security, performance and no-cost client implementation, Quad9 seems like a positive step in the direction of Internet security.
Related posts:
Protect DNS: A Conversation With Dave Dufour of Webroot
Closing Gaps in DNS
Infoblox Serves SDN DNS to Carriers With Trinzic Flex
— Curtis Franklin is the editor of
SecurityNow.com
. Follow him on Twitter
@kg4gwa
.

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Quad9 Brings Secure DNS to the Masses