An easy to install, high-performance, zero maintenance proxy to run an encrypted DNS server.

Protocols

The proxy aims at supporting the following protocols:

• DNSCrypt v2
• Anonymized DNSCrypt (WIP)
• DNS-over-HTTP (DoH)

All of these can be served simultaneously, on the same port (usually port 443). The proxy automatically detects what protocol is being used by each client.

Installation

Option 1: precompiled binary for Linux

Download the Encrypted DNS Server precompiled application for Linux (x86_64).

And make the application executable:

cd encrypted-dns-linux-x86_64
chmod +x encrypted-dns

Nothing else has to be installed. It doesn't require any external dependencies.

Option 2: compilation from source code

The proxy uses recent features of the Rust compiler, and currently requires rust-nightly.

Rust can installed with:

curl -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | bash -s -- -y --default-toolchain nightly
source $HOME/.cargo/env

Once rust is installed, the proxy can be compiled and installed as follows:

cargo install encrypted-dns
strip ~/.cargo/bin/encrypted-dns

The executable file will be copied to ~/.cargo/bin/encrypted-dns by default.

Setup

The proxy requires a recursive DNS resolver, such as Knot, PowerDNS or Unbound.

That resolver can run locally and only respond to 127.0.0.1. External resolvers such as Quad9 or Cloudflare DNS can also be used, but this may be less reliable due to rate limits.

In order to support DoH in addition to DNSCrypt, a DoH proxy must be running as well. rust-doh is the recommended DoH proxy server. DoH support is optional, as it is currently way more complicated to setup than DNSCrypt due to certificate management.

Make a copy of the example-encrypted-dns.toml configuration file named encrypted-dns.toml.

Then, review the encrypted-dns.toml file. This is where all the parameters can be configured, including the IP addresses to listen to.

You should probably at least change the listen_addresses and provider_name settings.

Start the proxy. It will automatically create a new provider key pair if there isn't any.

The DNS stamps are printed. They can be used directly with dnscrypt-proxy.

There is nothing else to do. Certificates are automatically generated and rotated.

Migrating from dnscrypt-wrapper

If you are currently running an encrypted DNS server using dnscrypt-wrapper, moving to the new proxy is simple:

• Double check that the provider name in encrypted-dns.toml matches the one you previously configured. If you forgot it, it can be recovered from its DNS stamp.
• Run dnscrypt-dns --import-from-dnscrypt-wrapper secret.key, with secret.key being the file with the dnscrypt-wrapper provider secret key.

Done. Your server is now running the new proxy.

Built-in DNS cache

The proxy includes a key cache, as well as a DNS cache to significantly reduce the load on upstream servers.

In addition, if a server is slow or unresponsive, expired cached queries will be returned, ensuring that popular domain names always keep being served.

State file

The proxy creates and updates a file named encrypted-dns.state by default. That file contains the provider secret key, as well as certificates and encryption keys.

Do not delete the file, unless you want to change parameters (such as the provider name), and keep it secret, or the keys will be lost.

Putting it in a directory that is only readable by the super-user is not a bad idea.

Filtering

Domains can be filtered directly by the proxy, see the [filtering] section of the configuration file.

Prometheus metrics

Prometheus metrics can optionally be enabled in order to monitor performance, cache efficiency, and more.