Secure DNS in the clouds

Hi, Habr!

Let me tell you about the project SkyDNS , which is designed to increase the security and productivity of the Internet, protecting habra people from dangerous sites and bad personalities.



Under the cut - a description of the service and some interesting figures. Discussion in the comments is welcome!

What is SkyDNS?

In a nutshell - this is a free internet filter. In the database of the service is information about nearly four million domains, grouped into several dozen categories.
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SkyDNS allows you to block viral and phishing sites, banners, pornography, and other resources. No censorship! Everything is determined by your personal preferences.

Some facts

The network of DNS servers consists of four machines spread across the country (in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk).

Every day the service processes from 30 to 50 million DNS requests (the load floats, on weekends people surf much less than on working days).

The base of sites is growing at a speed of about two thousand new domains per day.

For whom?

For you, of course :-) Seriously, there are several groups for which SkyDNS can be very useful.

For example, system administrators. Starting to work with the service, they kill two birds with one stone. First, they insure themselves and users significantly from situations where teapots follow all sorts of links advertising Anna Kournikova’s piquant links, and then they hit on full links through viruses, stolen passwords and so on. Secondly, they have the right to ask for a salary increase, allowing the director to increase the efficiency of employees by restricting access to social networks and entertainment.

However, business owners can use the service themselves, the setup does not take much time, and is available to any person with a technical education (and even without it).

Next, let's talk about parents. Many people think - how to protect their children from the dill that is plentifully spread across the expanses of the Internet. Now there is a solution, and the same pornography is blocked very effectively.

Just people who are tired of banners, teasers, and pop-up popups who are constantly trying to impose or “inform” something.

How does it work?

Filtering sites is performed at the DNS protocol level, which means it does not slow down surfing, and does not require processor resources or memory on your computer. Hazardous sites in this scheme are blocked to a real appeal to the contents of the pages, and therefore, the very possibility of at least some kind of clue for viruses or fraudsters is eliminated. Bad comrades do not even know about the attempt to move to their resource.

In general, the service does not even require the installation of additional software on the computer; it’s sufficient in the network settings of the computer, router, or modem to change the DNS addresses of your provider to SkyDNS: 193.58.251.251 .

Detailed manuals for users of Windows and Linux, are on the manual page .

You can work with SkyDNS from anywhere in the world, but at the moment we are focusing on people from Russia, Ukraine and the CIS. Go to the West (and maybe to the East) let's go in 2011.

What's next?

Of course, we will increase the capacity of the service, we plan to launch servers in all of the million-plus Russia and Ukraine.

Now we are actively working on a statistics subsystem, after launching which users will be able to understand which sites and categories are most popular, what the activity curve of visiting sites for 24 hours looks like, how many phishing and virus resources were able to block the service, and so on.

In addition, before the end of the year we plan to make a special offer for our schools, which will be able to use all the features of the service absolutely free of charge and legally - this is an extremely urgent task, given the constant checks and quibbles on informatics teachers from regular inspections.

There are not enough resources yet, but in 2011 we will definitely implement an API for connecting external services. The ability to provide an Internet filter under its own brand may be of interest to Internet providers.

Finita

On this, perhaps, everything. Thank you very much for your attention to all those good people who have mastered the entire text.

We will closely follow the comments to the topic :-)