Cloaking

Cloaking

Cloaking is a HOSTS (or /etc/hosts) file on steroids.

An example is worth a thousands words:

example.com 192.168.2.37

The above rule means that dnscrypt-proxy will return 192.168.2.37 as a response to a query for example.com or even www.example.com.

Maybe the actual IP address of this name is totally different. But the proxy will override it, and not even send the query to the DNS resolver. It will directly send an response with this IP to all clients.

The domain doesn't even have to exist: the IP will be returned as if it did.

This can be extremely useful if you develop websites and want to test them using their real name, while directing the traffic to your local computer.

Cloaking supports all filter patterns. So, the following are valid as well:

*.example.com   192.168.2.37
=example.com    127.0.0.1
*.example.*     127.0.0.2
example.*       127.0.0.3
example[0-9]*   127.0.0.4

Instead of IP addresses, names can also be cloaked to other names:

example.com     example.net

This will return the IP address of example.net as a response to a query for example.com.

A more practical example is:

www.google.*    forcesafesearch.google.com

This returns the IP address of forcesafesearch.google.com for queries to www.google.*, which is a way to force Google to return only "family-safe" results.

Target names are resolved and CNAME records are flattened. If the IP address for a target changes, the new IP will be automatically be picked up.

Unlike HOSTS files, dnscrypt-proxy's cloaking module can scale to large number of rules with no significant speed penalty.

Forwarding