"Privacy First: Guaranteed. We will never sell your data or use it to target ads. Period. We will never log your IP address (the way other companies identify you). And we’re not just saying that. We’ve retained KPMG to audit our systems annually to ensure that we're doing what we say.
Frankly, we don’t want to know what you do on the Internet—it’s none of our business—and we’ve taken the technical steps to ensure we can’t."
* no logging
* DNS over HTTPS
In the same breath, they insinuate that Google both sells and uses DNS usage from their 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 resolvers.
Now, audits are generally not worth very much (even, perhaps even especially, from a Big Four group like KPMG), but for this type of thing (verifying that a company isn't doing something they promised they would not do) they're about the best we have.
BTW if you want to use DNS over HTTPS on Linux/Mac I strongly recommend dnscrypt proxy V2 (golang rewrite) https://github.com/jedisct1/dnscrypt-proxy and put e.g. cloudflare in their config toml file to make use of it.
What is intriguing to me is why Cloudflare are offering this. Perhaps it is to provide data on traffic that is 'invisible' to them, as in it doesn't currently touch their networks. Possibly as a sales-lead generator.
Or is the plan to become dominant and then use DNS blackholing to shutdown malware that is a threat to their systems?
Cloudflare is somewhat right: Means, Motive and Opportunity - but for a conviction you have to prove someone acted on the Opportunity. The Motive of Google is tampered with severe risk for loosing trust.
Cloudflare can make an argument they are fundamentally better positioned and that is all they do. As with all US based operations the NSA may cook up some convincing counterarguments and we may never know.
Indeed, see the recent KPMG scandal:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/kpmg-indictment-suggests-m...
I pay them to access the internet, every further information they gather about my internet activity does not mean any benefit for me.
The OP did not say that cloudflare is "saying" that. The OP very clearly said they are "insinuating" it. And yes under the heading "DNS's Privacy Problem" the post mentions:
"With all the concern over the data that companies like Facebook and Google are collecting on you,..."
I think that juxtaposition of this statement under a bolded heading of "DNS's Privacy Problem" is very much insinuating that.
Aside it's strange https everywhere has been pushed aggressively by many here under the bogeyman of ISP adware and spying while completely ignoring the much larger adware and privacy threats posed by the stalking of Google, Facebook and others. It is disingenuous and insincere.
"We committed to never writing the querying IP addresses to disk and wiping all logs within 24 hours."
"While we need some logging to prevent abuse and debug issues, we couldn't imagine any situation where we'd need that information longer than 24 hours. And we wanted to put our money where our mouth was, so we committed to retaining KPMG, the well-respected auditing firm, to audit our code and practices annually and publish a public report confirming we're doing what we said we would."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-revenue-kpmg-secret-a...
Secondly, the idea in audit is not really about digging into the engineering. So although they will need people who have some idea what DNS is, they don't need experts - this isn't code review. The auditors tend to spend most of their time looking at paperwork and at policy - so e.g. we don't expect auditors to discover a Raspberry Pi configured for packet logging hidden in a patchbay, but we do expect them to find if "Delete logs every morning" is an ambition and it's not anybody's job to actually do that, nor is it anybody's job to check it got done.
If it was easy, it would have been done during the TLS 1.3 process, but after a lot of discussion we're down to basically "Here is what people expect 'SNI encryption' would do for them, here's why all the obvious stuff can't achieve that, and here are some ugly, slow things that could work, now what?"
I don't think it's intended to say anything about Google specifically. Keep in mind that there are many other DNS services out there, and some of them are known for being pretty scummy, e.g. replacing NXDOMAIN results with "smart search" / ad pages.
KPMG's risk department - the lawyers' lawyers - appears to be violently allergic to their customers disclosing any report to outside parties. Based on my experience you can get a copy, but first you and the primary customer need to submit some paperwork. And among the conditions you need to agree with is that you don't redistribute the report or its contents.
Disclosure: I deal with security audits and technical aspects of compliance.
"to audit our code and practices annually and publish a public report confirming we're doing what we said we would."
I run an investment fund (hedge fund) and we are completing our required annual audit (not by KPMG). It is quite thorough, they manually check balances in our bank accounts directly with the bank, they verify balances directly off blockchain (it's a crypto fund) and have us prove ownership of keys by signing messages, etc. And they do do a due diligence (lots of doodoo there) that we are not doing scammy things like the equivalent of having a raspberry pi attached to the network. Now this is extremely tough of course, and they are limited in what they can accomplish there, but the thought does cross their mind. All firms are different, but from what we've seen most auditors do decent good jobs most of the time. Their reputation can only be hit so many times before their name is no longer valuable to be an auditor.
> "We committed to never writing the querying IP addresses to disk ..."
A DNS resolver does need to record the querying IP for at least a few moments because, you know, they have to respond to your query.
However, I don't know why they changed that sentence; it could be for other reasons too.
It's not uncommon to retain logs like that for debugging purposes, abuse prevention purposes, etc, but then to go back later and wipe them or anonymize them.
Isn't that the entire point of such an audit? To be able to present it to outside third-parties?
For examples, Mozilla (CA/B) requires audits for root CAs. The CA must provide a link to the audit on the auditor's public web site -- forwarding a copy or hosting it on their own isn't sufficient.
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/ [2] https://1.1.1.1
If you've ever been audited for some other reason, you'll know they find lots of things, and then you fix them, and that's "fine". But well, is it fine? Or, should we acknowledge that they found lots of things and what those things were, even if you subsequently fixed them? The CA/B says you have several months to hand over your letter after the audit period. Guess what those months are spent doing...
Only a handful of small specialist firms actually just move bits in the UK. Every single UK ISP big enough to advertise on television is signed up to filter traffic and block things for being "illegal" or maybe if Hollywood doesn't like them, or if they have "naughty" words mentioned, or just because somebody slipped. If you're thinking "Not mine" and it runs TV adverts then, oops, nope, you're wrong about that and have had your Internet censored without realising it. I wonder how ISPs got their bad reputation...
Edit: in SSH2 the server authentication happens in the first cryptographic message from server (for the obvious efficiency reasons), and thus for doing SNI-style certificate selection there would have to be some plaintext server-ID in first clients message, but the security of the protocol does not require that as long as the in-tunnel authentication is mutual (it is for things like kerberos).
You are correct that you can do this if you spend one round trip first to set up the channel, and both the proposals for how we might encrypt SNI in that Draft do pay a round trip. Which is why I said they're slow and ugly. And as you noticed, SSH2 and rdesktop do not, in fact, spend an extra round trip to buy this capability they just go without.