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VPN DNS leak test

dnsleaktest.com

41–46 of 46 posts

Re: VPN DNS leak test

#42

And this issue could be easily overcome if more projects implemented the "socks5h://" protocol (note the 'h'), initially introduced by curl[1] to mandate the SOCKS proxy to also tunnel DNS requests. Sadly it seems that very few programs recognize this (non-standard) protocol: git[2] (using curl), python's request (and urllib) module[3] ... And not much else. [1]: https://curl.haxx.se/docs/manpage.html#--proxy [2]: ht…

Huh? VPNs aren't SOCKS proxies.

Re: VPN DNS leak test

#43
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox over a SOCKS5 proxy done with ssh passes this test if you enable the proxy DNS setting. Creating the proxy is as simple as: ssh -D 9999 -q -N and then configure that in the firefox proxy settings (socks to localhost:9999). If you want a simple way to enable/disable this in firefox I built a minimal extension to do it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/proxyswitcher... The defaults in the config a…

You might be the right person to ask: When I tried shadowsocks and enabled "proxy dns" in Firefox, every website became painfully slow. Is this simply because no DNS cache had been built?

Don't know but note that shadowsocks is not a traditional socks proxy. If I understood it correctly you do a traditional socks proxy to localhost and then a more heavily encrypted link to the actual host. Maybe that second link was slow, either because of the encryption or because it's written in python? ssh gives you as much or more security anyway as there are few protocols as thoroughly checked than ssh and performance seems nice.

Re: VPN DNS leak test

#44
post #32

I'm really really interested to find out how they're discovering the DNS server IP addresses I'm using. The only clue I have is that they're trying to resolve a bunch of fake domain names (which show up as unresolveable in the console). The webpage has the IP addresses written directly into it (so clearly the data came from the server) which means there's nothing I can investigate (eg, in JS) from my end. What's goin…

"The DNS leak test works by sending your client a series of domain names to resolve within a specific test domain. Each request is sent from your client to your configured DNS server. Even if you have configured a single DNS server, there may be many other servers that the request is passed on to in order to be resolved (normally to load balance the requests). For example if you configure Google DNS then you will oft…

OH, nice one. I knew the random hostname was part of the puzzle, but couldn't quite get that far. Thanks for the concise explanation :)

Re: VPN DNS leak test

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The DNS leak test works by sending your client a series of domain names to resolve within a specific test domain. Each request is sent from your client to your configured DNS server. Even if you have configured a single DNS server, there may be many other servers that the request is passed on to in order to be resolved (normally to load balance the requests). For example if you configure Google DNS then you will oft…

friendly reminder not to use google DNS if you care about privacy (which you probably do if you're using a VPN in the first place), because you're basically giving them your fingerprint in the form of the websites you visit.

Hmmmm.

Google has ~7ms response time for me though. Even my ISP's nameservers are slower than that :( the average everywhere else is 200ms (yup).

My internet is slow enough that this makes it a tiny bit more annoying.

But you make a very valid point, and... sigh convenience is such an hacked catalyst nowadays :(

Re: VPN DNS leak test

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The DNS leak test works by sending your client a series of domain names to resolve within a specific test domain. Each request is sent from your client to your configured DNS server. Even if you have configured a single DNS server, there may be many other servers that the request is passed on to in order to be resolved (normally to load balance the requests). For example if you configure Google DNS then you will oft…

friendly reminder not to use google DNS if you care about privacy (which you probably do if you're using a VPN in the first place), because you're basically giving them your fingerprint in the form of the websites you visit.

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy

Unless you're the tinfoil-hat wearing type who believes they're lying, their privacy policy looks pretty good to me.

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