I work in cyber security so I’m already embarrassed to not know this. But I do know how DNS works. I just don’t understand what people mean when they say “secure DNS”. Ive tried looking it up, but it keeps falling flat on me.
I use nextdns on my computer and phone, but I still don’t know what it’s doing, how it works, or anything. Can you explain what makes services like nextDNS secure, or why people change or even have different DNS servers configured?
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There are a couple of things that might be “secure DNS” as that’s not really a well defined term… there’s DNSSEC which is meant to provide confirmation that the data you get back is legit and not tampered with.. there’s DNS over SSL/HTTPS where the communication between the client and the server is encrypted and an eavesdropper can’t see your request… There’s the notion that your ISP may be collecting your DNS queries and selling the information to data brokers so you should use somebody else’s DNS servers… And there’s DNS servers that act as filters, preventing you from visiting “bad” sites (whatever your service calls bad).
NextDNS looks like it’s the last item. Your DNS requests go through them, and they have a listing of sites that are good, bad, etc and will refuse to answer queries properly for the bad sites… like advertising networks, etc. A simple solution to eliminate a lot of ads on your entire internet connection even for non-browsers or browsers without adblock add-ons, etc. When ads are hosted by a 3rd party when you’re browsing a web site, DNS requests are needed to find the 3rd party and NextDNS should block the request and so the ad doesn’t load.
If you’ve ever heard of a “PiHole”, it’s software you can run at home to do your own DNS filtering in the same way. NextDNS is just doing something similar as a cloud service sort of thing.
DNS is one of those services that are absolutely essential. Without it, your internet connection is basically worthless. So a good, fast, responsive, and safe DNS service is important. Most ISPs provide such services to their customers, but as I’ve broadly gone over above, there may be reasons you want something else.
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