Fast Follower – Even More Privacy Centric DNS!

After posting this blog entry, I had a number of people reach out to me to tell me that, while my configuration recommendations were good, there was something new in the DNScrypt protocol that I could take advantage of to make my DNS even more obfuscated – “Annonymized DNS”.

The way this protocol works is that you send your encrypted DNS request to a relay (which can’t decrypt it). The relay then sends the encrypted request to your resolver. The resolver decrypts the request, resolves it and sends the encrypted answer back to the relay. The relay (which can’t decrypt the answer either), sends the encrypted answer back to you where you can decrypt it and stick it in the cache.

If you followed all of that, the relay (even if it is evil and logging the heck out of everything you do) can’t know what your request is. It only passes it along. The resolver (again, it could be evil and logging stuff too) does know your request but doesn’t know that it is coming from you! It only knows that the request came from the relay.

This is a pretty cool thing when it comes to making your DNS resolution even more private!

To make this work with the setup (regardless of the operating system), you simply need to add one more section to your dnscrypt-proxy.toml configuration file:

[anonymized_dns]routes = [
{ server_name=’cs-ch’, via=[‘sdns://gRE1MS4xNTguMTY2Ljk3OjQ0Mw’] },
{ server_name=’faelix-ch-ipv4′, via=[‘sdns://gRMxODUuMjUzLjE1NC42Njo0MzQz’] },
{ server_name=’yofiji-se-ipv6′, via=[‘sdns://gS5bMmEwMjoxMjA1OjM0ZTc6OGUzMDpiMjZlOmJmZmY6ZmUxZDplMTliXTo4NDQz’] }
]

The server_name fields should be recognizable because they are the ones that you listed for your resolvers. The sdns mumbo-jumbo is the name of the relay you are asking to use for each one of them. They are published on this page. I’d recommend picking ones in countries you like and that are different providers from the resolvers. If you have an evil service provider that runs both a relay and a resolver, they could piece the traffic back together. If they are different entities, it is far less likely that they would.

Enjoy!

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *