DNSCrypt

[Plexx]

Has anyone tried DNSCrypt?

I am curious to find out more but still a bit sceptical.

Link

[bogdan]

Haven't tried it but the first thing that comes to my mind is that the traditional DNS could be seen as a privacy issue. So when it comes to protecting your privacy from someone listening to your connection DNSCrypt is a small step forward. As we all know DNS is used to retrieve the IP address of the server we are connecting to. Someone listening to our connection could for example determine that we are connecting to certain sites even if we are connecting using SSL because traditional DNS is not encrypted.

I don't think it solves many other security issues besides privacy though and you have to trust OpenDNS to use it and run yet another application on your system (give up on some resources). Also it is only useful if you connect to a certain website using SSL, otherwise the rest of the traffic is not encrypted. Plus this is not a new standard (as opposed to DNSSEC) it is just a feature of one of the DNS providers that offers point-to-point encryption of your DNS queries.

[Plexx]

Thank you for the clarification bogdan!

[bogdan]

I've installed the application on my Windows machine and I wish it was lighter. The OpenDNSInterface service takes about 20-30 MB of RAM and for some reason there is a constant I/O and CPU usage (1-3%). There is also OpenDNSCryptService and dnscrypt-proxy using a combined 20 MB of RAM. It also requires .NET. It still is in early development stages (version 0.0.5). Another issue I have with it is that it starts requiring administrative privileges and on my normal user account this means that I have to enter my admin password every time I log in.

   

Edit: I uninstalled the application and the uninstall process didn't restore my previous DNS settings so make sure you note them down so you can restore them later if you decide to uninstall DNSCrypt.

[Plexx]

Thanks bogdan. I shall take into consideration the DNS settings before even installing DNSCrypt.

What I dont understand is why it takes between 20 to 30 MB of RAM