> On Apr 2, 2018, at 7:24 PM, Robert Mathews (OSIA) <math...@hawaii.edu> wrote:
> *Group Co-founded by City of London Police promises 'no snooping on your 
> requests’*

Note that this is _extremely_ misleading, since the group being referred to 
here is _not_ Quad9, but instead GCA, one of the many donors that are 
supporting the Quad9 project.  Quad9 doesn’t have any association with the City 
of London Police, other than that they’re among the many tens of millions of 
users in the general public.

> *DNS resolver 9.9.9.9 will check requests against IBM threat database*

Not exactly correct…  There are nineteen threat intel providers, including 
Intel, Cisco, and F-Secure, which provide real-time feeds of compromised and 
C&C domains to Quad9.  Quad9 does a bunch of reputation scoring on the data 
feeds to figure out which are likely problematic and which might be 
false-positives, before including them in the optional block-list.  There’s a 
partial list of the threat-intel providers about halfway down this page:  
https://www.quad9.net/about/  And you can check at any time whether an FQDN is 
currently being blocked using a field on the front page of the Quad9 site.

> On Apr 2, 2018, at 7:36 PM, Seth Mattinen <se...@rollernet.us> wrote:
> ...an IBM database is queried, just like it says on their website? That 
> doesn't mean they are recording who is making what requests.

Correct.  All that is defined in the privacy policy.  No IP addresses are 
recorded.  No query strings are recorded, but ones that match an FQDN on the 
block-list are tallied, and that tally is used to improve the 
reputation-scoring of the threat intel providers, and is fed back to the threat 
intel providers to help them improve their own data quality.  I believe the 
privacy policy that’s still up right now says that we may optionally give the 
threat-intel providers aggregate statistics per country, but we’re not actually 
doing that in practice, and it’s our intention to narrow down the policy to 
reflect actual practice.

On 4/2/18 7:43 PM, J Crowe wrote:
> That database could possibly be ingested and used locally.

Correct.  The database is ingested and used locally _at each server_, so the 
queries never even leave the server.  Anything else would be too slow and 
stateful to work.

> Traffic may not even be traversing to the database hosted by IBM.

Correct.  The threat-intel data comes from them to us, and a count of matches 
goes from us to them.

> At least they are open about where they are getting the data that allows for 
> blocking to certain FQDNs.

Yeah…  Sorry only twelve of the nineteen are listed on the web site right now, 
but the project is stretched pretty thin keeping up with requests for new 
locations, and we haven’t had a lot of time to update the web site…  There’s no 
intention for the list to not be public, and I can get and post the full list 
if anyone cares.  Though it would probably be better if I spent that time 
hunting for someone to update the web site.  :-)

                                -Bill

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