Speaker
Description
When trying to protect against malware and phishing attacks we can try to protect our users and systems at different levels in the network. We could, for example, block suspicious connections at our firewalls. It would be even better though if we could even prevent clients from even trying to set up those connections in the first place. This is where the Protective DNS project (GN5-2, WP8, task 3) comes in.
The Protective DNS project is an effort to design and implement a prototype recursive DNS resolver that will block requests for malicious domain names and thus prevent clients from even requesting the IP address for a potentially malicious host. This is transparent for the users and does not require special settings on their end. This is not meant as a replacement for existing security measures but as an addition.
The goal is to design a setup that uses open source materials, and which will provide flexible security functionality while at the same time being performant. There are two objectives for this project. First is to provide a reference implementation to share within the community so that the work can be duplicated if desired. Second, if sufficient interest is found within the GÉANT community we will explore providing a (multi-feed) opt-in service for sites to use for more complete protection.
This is an update on the project both in terms of where we are in the planning and implementation, but also a request for identifying groups of people who might be interested in helping us test the current operational model. This update will include the current software architecture, the set of security controls we intend to make available, the state of anycast for redundancy and performance, as well as some initial ideas about which feeds we are intending to test.