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A Look At the Safety of Google Public DNS
darthcamaro writes "Yesterday we discussed Google's launch of its new Public DNS service. Now Metasploit founder and CSO at Rapid7, H D Moore, investigates how well-protected Google's service is against the Kaminsky DNS flaw. Moore has put together a mapping of Google's source port distribution on the Public DNS service. In his view, it looks like the source ports are sufficiently random, even though they are limited to a small range of ports. The InternetNews report on Moore's research concludes: 'What Moore's preliminary research clearly demonstrates to me is that Google really does need to live up to its promise here. Unlike a regular ISP, Google will be subject to more scrutiny (and research) than other DNS providers.'"
The one thing that strikes me as silly about the "what if Google datamines our DNS requests" concern is that those people assume their ISPs aren't already doing so.
And what strikes me as even more silly is when people use the comeback of "But [insert person, group, company, etc] is (probably) already doing it too!" as if that justifies the actions of someone else.
Their public statements say that they are not linking the requests to other Google services, and that they are discarding ip addresses within a day or two.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The especially odd part about the complaint is that Google has an upfront, posted policy about what they are doing as far as retaining your DNS requests, which I've never seen from an ISP.
I'm not saying that it justifies it in any way. I'm merely pointing out that scapegoating a company that does genuinely good things while ignoring the company that routinely dicks its customers is odd. Plus, if you had read yesterday's article, you would understand that google is purging IP addresses from the records.
And what strikes me as even more silly is that Google has a privacy policy for the service that says all logs are deleted after 48 hours and aren't linked back to other Google services whereas I have no privacy statement at all about DNS from my ISP (since they slipped it in silently about 4 months ago).
You do realize the inherent conflict of interest in criticism from a competitor right?
Do remember that at least and load up on grains of salt.