Google Public DNS


Google Public DNS is a Domain Name System service offered to Internet users worldwide by Google. It functions as a recursive name server.
Google Public DNS was announced on 3 December 2009, in an effort described as "making the web faster and more secure". As of 2018, it is the largest public DNS service in the world, handling over a trillion queries per day. Google Public DNS is not related to Google Cloud DNS, which is a DNS hosting service.

Service

The Google Public DNS service operates recursive name servers for public use at the following four IP addresses. The addresses are mapped to the nearest operational server by anycast routing.
DoH addresseshttps://dns.google/dns-query
https://dns.google/resolve?
IPv4 addresses8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4
IPv6 addresses2001:4860:4860::8888
2001:4860:4860::8844

The service does not use conventional DNS name server software, such as BIND, instead relying on a custom-designed implementation, conforming to the DNS standards set forth by the IETF. It fully supports the DNSSEC protocol since 19 March 2013. Previously, Google Public DNS accepted and forwarded DNSSEC-formatted messages but did not perform validation.
Some DNS providers practice DNS hijacking while processing queries, redirecting web browsers to an advertisement site operated by the provider when a nonexistent domain name is queried. This is considered intentional breaking of the DNS specification. The Google service correctly replies with a non-existent domain response.
The Google service also addresses DNS security. A common attack vector is to interfere with a DNS service to achieve redirection of web pages from legitimate to malicious servers. Google documents efforts to be resistant to DNS cache poisoning, including “Kaminsky Flaw” attacks as well as denial-of-service attacks.
Google claims various efficiency and speed benefits, such as using anycast routing to send user requests to the closest data center, over-provisioning servers to handle denial-of-service attacks and load balancing servers using two cache levels with a small per-host cache containing the most popular names and another pool of servers partitioned by the name to be looked up. This second level cache reduces the fragmentation and cache miss rate that can result from increasing the number of servers.
As of January 2020, DNSPerf rates Google Public DNS as the fourth fastest public DNS resolver worldwide, behind Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1, DNSFilter, and OpenDNS.

DNS64

The Google Public DNS64 service operates recursive name servers for public use at the following two IP addresses for use with NAT64. These servers are compatible with DNS over HTTPS.
DoH addresseshttps://dns64.dns.google/dns-query
https://dns64.dns.google/resolve?name=ipv4only.arpa&type=AAAA
IPv6 addresses2001:4860:4860::6464
2001:4860:4860::64

Privacy

Google stated that for the purposes of performance and security, the querying IP address will be deleted after 24–48 hours, but Internet service provider and location information are stored permanently on their servers.
According to Google's general privacy policy, "We may combine personal information from one service with information, including personal information, from other Google services". However, Google Public DNS's policy specifically states that "We don't correlate or combine information from our temporary or permanent logs with any personal information that you have provided Google for other services."

History

In December 2009, Google Public DNS was launched with its announcement on the Official Google Blog by product manager Prem Ramaswami, with an additional post on the Google Code blog.
In January 2019, Google DNS adopted the DNS over TLS protocol.

DNSSEC

At the launch of Google Public DNS, it did not directly support DNSSEC. Although RRSIG records could be queried, the AD flag was not set in the launch version, meaning the server was unable to validate signatures for all of the data. This was upgraded on 28 January 2013, when Google's DNS servers silently started providing DNSSEC validation information, but only if the client explicitly set the DNSSEC OK flag on its query. This service requiring a client-side flag was replaced on 6 May 2013 with full DNSSEC validation by default, meaning all queries will be validated unless clients explicitly opt out.

Client subnet

Since June 2014, Google Public DNS automatically detects nameservers that support EDNS Client Subnet options as defined in the IETF draft, and will send queries with ECS options to such name servers automatically.

Censorship in Turkey

In March 2014, use of Google Public DNS was blocked in Turkey after it was used to circumvent the blocking of Twitter, which took effect on 20 March 2014 under court order. The block was the result of earlier remarks by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan who vowed to "wipe out Twitter" following damaging allegations of corruption in his inner circle. The method became popular after it was determined that a simple domain name block was used to enforce the ban, which would easily be bypassed by using an alternate DNS system. Activists distributed information on how to use the service, and spray-painted the IP addresses used by the service as graffiti on buildings. Following the discovery of this method, the government moved to directly block Twitter's IP address, and Google Public DNS was blocked entirely.