Comodo Secure DNS v OpenDNS

[MidnightCowboy]

After queries in various threads about the comparable benefits of these two I contacted Melih at Comodo for his take on their service. He in turn passed me down to Egemen who is the Project Manager at Comodo. This is what he came back with:

SecureDNS has a couple of differentiators. The most obvious one for the end
users is the content filtering part. SecureDNS, although we haven't provided
a granular way for the users to customize, can filter malware websites(e.g.
www[dot]xxxnet - two examples were given).

Specific to Security, SecureDNS center works to maintain the security of our
users and their DNS infrastructure. The SecureDNS network offers protection
from Cache Poisoning, and is globally available providing reliability and
speed. In cases where SecureDNS is used to manage the authoritative DNS,
the benefit is strengthened as there is no intermediate opportunity for
Cache Poisoning. Records remain within our zones and are protected (e.g.,
our authoritative and recursive are on the same LAN internally and there is
no chance of a fake response beating the real response (race condition) -
one of the required elements of the cache poisoning/Kaminski DNS
vulnerability).

Compared to OpenDNS, I do not think they have an authoritative solution
penetrating the market - and can leverage these benefits.

Antoher security enhancement that the SecureDNS network offers over OpenDNS
is regarding DNS DDoS attacks. The SecureDNS network and related services
help users mitigate and minimize the impact of DDoS attacks. The SecureDNS
Security team provides a full set of DNS DDoS mitigation services from
traffic monitoring, threat analysis and detection and finally mitigation.

I hope people find this additional information of some use when deciding between the two, or indeed any of the other alternatives.

[jim]

I appreciate your efforts MC but he might as well have been speaking Vulcan to me. The only thing I can get out of it is that he thinks his product gives better protection. Well he would say that wouldn't he. I changed to OpenDNS because it claimed to be more stable and faster than the built in service, and this certainly seems to be the case. I don't know enough to comment on anything else.

[Sope]

Thanks for taking the time to get hold of this info, it's very useful.

After a recent discussion here I've actually chosen to move away from OpenDNS and am currently trying out DNS Advantage as it also appears to offer superior security over OpenDNS. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that Comodo Secure DNS and DNS Advantage are very closely linked as they appear to share the same cache amongst other things (although I may well be wrong on this point < no expert).

Having used OpenDNS for a while I was disappointed to find they have recently removed the malware site blocking feature from their free service - ref.
On the face of it, the other two mentioned certainly look like better choices.

[PsychEroc]

It would be nice if there were a way to evaluate these security claims.
Until then, we'll have to just take their word.