1.1.1.1: Cloudflare's New DNS Attracting 'Gigabits Per Second' of Rubbish (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Cloudflare's new speed and privacy enhancing domain name system (DNS) servers, launched on Sunday, are also part of an experiment being conducted in partnership with the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC). The experiment aims to understand how DNS can be improved in terms of performance, security, and privacy. "We are now critically reliant on the integrity of the DNS, yet the details of the way it operates still remains largely opaque," wrote APNIC's chief scientist Geoff Huston in a blog post. "We are aware that the DNS has been used to generate malicious denial of service attacks, and we are keen to understand if there are simple and widely deployable measures that can be taken to mitigate such attacks. The DNS relies on caching to operate efficiently and quickly, but we are still unsure as to how well caching actually performs. We are also unclear how much of the DNS is related to end user or application requirements for name resolution, and how much is related to the DNS chattering to itself."

The Cloudflare-APNIC experiment uses two IPv4 address ranges, 1.1.1/24 and 1.0.0/24, which have been reserved for research use. Cloudflare's new DNS uses two addresses within those ranges, 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. These address ranges were originally configured as "dark traffic addresses", and some years ago APNIC partnered with Google to analyze the unsolicited traffic directed at them. There was a lot of it. "Our initial work with it certainly showed it to be an unusually strong attractor for bad traffic. At the time we stopped doing it with Google, it was over 50 gigabits per second. Quite frankly, few folk can handle that much noise," Huston told ZDNet on Wednesday. By putting Cloudflare's DNS on these research addresses, APNIC gets to see the noise as well as the DNS traffic -- or at least "a certain factored amount" of it -- for research purposes.

Comments

Re:Gigabits per second of rubbish? No shit.

[omnichad]

ping 1.1.1.1

Pinging 1.1.1.1 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 1.1.1.1: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=53
Reply from 1.1.1.1: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=53
Reply from 1.1.1.1: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=53
Reply from 1.1.1.1: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=53

Maybe your ISP just doesn't route the traffic. That's a fast link. Though Google DNS is 15ms from here.

Re:the submitter should train their network-fu

[cciechad]

Thats been pretty standard in networking for years. Dropping any 0's. Like 10/8 or 8.8/16. Its just a shorthand.

FFS

[jbmartin6]

The new DNS isn't "attracting" anything. All the traffic to 1.1.1.1 was already there, that's why they put the DNS host on that address. They wanted to experiment with exposing it to tons of crap traffic.