A flexible DNS proxy, with support for modern encrypted DNS protocols such as DNSCrypt v2 and DNS-over-HTTP/2.

dnscrypt-proxy 2.0.0beta11 is available for download!

Installation

How do I install DNSCrypt?

You can't. Because DNSCrypt is just a specification.

That specification has been implemented in software such as unbound, dnsdist, dnscrypt-wrapper and dnscrypt-proxy.

dnscrypt-proxy is a flexible DNS proxy. It runs on your computer or router, and can locally block unwanted content, reveal where your devices are silently sending data to, make applications feel faster by caching DNS responses, and improve security and confidentiality by communicating to upstream DNS servers over secure channels.

Setting up dnscrypt-proxy

1. Modify the dnscrypt-proxy.toml configuration file according to your needs.
2. Make sure that nothing else is already listening to port 53 on your system and run (in a console with elevated privileges on Windows) the dnscrypt-proxy application. Change your DNS settings to the configured IP address and check that everything works as expected. A DNS query for resolver.00f.net should return one of the chosen DNS servers instead of your ISP's resolver.
3. Register as a system service (see below).

Installing as a system service (Windows, Linux, MacOS)

With administrator privileges, type dnscrypt-proxy -service install to register dnscrypt-proxy as a system service, and dnscrypt-proxy -service start to start it.

On Windows, this is not even required: you can just double-click on server-install.bat to install the service.

Done. It will automatically start at boot.

This setup procedure is compatible with Windows, Linux (systemd, Upstart, SysV), and macOS (launchd).

Other commands include stop, restart (useful after a configuration change) and uninstall.

Running it as a non-root user on Linux

The following command adds the required attributes to the dnscrypt-proxy file so that it can run as a non-root user:

sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=+pe dnscrypt-proxy

Current status/features

The current 2.0.0 beta version includes all the major features from dnscrypt-proxy 1.9.5 (support for dnscrypt v2, synthetic IPv6 responses, logging, blocking, forwarding and caching), with improved reliability, flexbility, usability and performance.

Features	dnscrypt-proxy 1.x	dnscrypt-proxy 2.x
Status	Old PoC, barely maintained any more	Very new, but quickly evolving
Code quality	Big ugly mess	Readable, easy to work on
Reliability	Poor, due to completely broken handling of edge cases	Excellent
Security	Written in C, bundles patched versions from old branches of system libraries	Written in standard and portable Go
Dependencies	Specific versions of dnscrypt-proxy, libldns and libtool	None
Upstream connections using TCP	Catastrophic, requires client retries	Implemented as anyone would expect, works well with TOR
XChaCha20 support	Only if compiled with recent versions of libsodium	Yes, always available
Support of links with small MTU	Unreliable due to completely broken padding	Reliable, properly implemented
Support for multiple servers	Nonexistent	Yes, with automatic failover and load-balancing
Custom additions	C API, requires libldns for sanity	Simple Go structures using miekg/dns
AAAA blocking for IPv4-only networks	Yes	Yes
DNS caching	Yes, with ugly hacks for DNSSEC support	Yes, without ugly hacks
EDNS support	Broken with custom records	Yes
Asynchronous filters	Lol, no, filters block everything	Of course, thanks to Go
Session-local storage for extensions	Impossible	Yes
Multicore support	Nonexistent	Yes, thanks to Go
Efficient padding of queries	Couldn't be any worse	Yes
Multiple local sockets	Impossible	Of course. IPv4, IPv6, as many as you like
Automatically picks the fastest servers	Lol, it supports only one at a time, anyway	Yes, out of the box
Official, always up-to-date pre-built libraries	None	Yes, for many platforms. See below.
Automatically downloads and verifies servers lists	No. Requires custom scripts, cron jobs and dependencies (minisign)	Yes, built-in, including signature verification
Advanced expressions in blacklists (ads*.example[0-9]*.com)	No	Yes
Forwarding with load balancing	No	Yes
Built-in system installer	Only on Windows	Install/uninstall/start/stop/restart as a service on Windows, Linux/(systemd,Upstart,SysV), and macOS/launchd
Built-in servers latency benchmark	No	Yes
Query type filter: only log a relevant set of query types	No	Yes
Support for the Windows Event Log	No	Yes
Log suspicious queries (leading to NXDOMAIN)	No	Yes
IP filtering	Yes, but can be bypassed due to a vulnerability	Yes, doesn't have the vulnerability from v1
Systemd support	Yes, but don't complain about it	Yes, but don't complain about it either
Stamps, as a simple way to provide server parameters	No	Yes
Supported protocols	DNSCrypt v1, DNSCrypt v2	DNSCrypt v1, DNSCrypt v2, DNS-over-HTTP/2

Experimental

• DNS-over-HTTP/2 (DoH), the successor to DNS-over-TLS

Using DoH currently requires a working DNS configuration on the proxy host (DNS server host names have to be resolved).

Planned features

• Offline responses
• Local DNSSEC validation
• Support for the V1 plugin API
• Real documentation

Pre-built binaries

Up-to-date, pre-built binaries are available for:

• Dragonfly BSD
• FreeBSD/x86
• FreeBSD/x86_64
• Linux/arm
• Linux/arm64
• Linux/mips
• Linux/mips64
• Linux/mips64le
• Linux/x86
• Linux/x86_64
• MacOS X
• NetBSD/x86
• NetBSD/x86_64
• OpenBSD/x86
• OpenBSD/x86_64
• Windows
• Windows 64 bit