How to avoid DNS leaks?

[beelze]

DNS not leaked:

# proxychains wget -q ipinfo.io/ip -O -
[proxychains] config file found: /etc/proxychains.conf
[proxychains] preloading /usr/lib64/libproxychains.so.4.17
[proxychains] DLL init: proxychains-ng 4.17
Prepended http:// to 'ipinfo.io/ip'
[proxychains] Strict chain  ...  xx.xx.xx.xx:yy  ...  ipinfo.io:80  ...  OK
94.131.98.223

All is ok, DNS query went through system resolver on proxy server side (checked via tcpdump) but:

# proxychains curl ipinfo.io/ip
[proxychains] config file found: /etc/proxychains.conf
[proxychains] preloading /usr/lib64/libproxychains.so.4.17
[proxychains] DLL init: proxychains-ng 4.17
[proxychains] Strict chain  ...  xx.xx.xx.xx:yy  ...  34.117.59.81:80  ...  OK
94.131.98.223

Leaked, DNS query went through localhost system resolver (checked via tcpdump).

proxychains.conf:

strict_chain
proxy_dns_daemon 127.0.0.1:1053
remote_dns_subnet 224      
tcp_read_time_out 15000    
tcp_connect_time_out 8000  
[ProxyList]                                         
socks5 xx.xx.xx.xx yy usr pwd

I encountered this issue trying to find a solution for more generic problem: complete elimination "DNS leak" issue. Of course, it can't be done at localhost, so I'm tunneling all traffic via "router" running tun2socks, but resolving is still a problem – tunneling DNS queries via proxy is a «leak» too. The one and only solution is a delegating resolve to a socks proxy and I'm trying to understang if it can be done with proxychains.

[rofl0r]

odd. can you figure out how curl does its DNS lookups ? if your analysis is correct, it would appear it doesn't use libc facilities but rather its own UDP code or another library that circumvents the libc APIs.

[beelze]

I did strace of curl ipinfo.io/ip. curl.log

seems c-ares (AsynchDNS) is to blame:

# curl -V
curl 8.10.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/8.10.1 OpenSSL/3.3.2 zlib/1.3.1 brotli/1.1.0 zstd/1.5.6 c-ares/1.34.3 libpsl/0.21.5 nghttp2/1.62.1 nghttp3/1.7.0
Release-Date: 2024-09-18
Protocols: dict file ftp ftps http https imap imaps ipfs ipns mqtt pop3 pop3s rtsp smtp smtps tftp ws wss
Features: alt-svc AsynchDNS brotli HSTS HTTP2 HTTP3 HTTPS-proxy IPv6 Largefile libz NTLM PSL SSL threadsafe TLS-SRP UnixSockets zstd

[rofl0r]

nice research. while it's theoretically possible (with considerable effort) to capture the udp traffic and return a fake ip address (just like proxy_dns does currently), i don't think it's gonna be implemented in the near future. your best option is to recompile curl from source and disable the use of c-ares (assuming that's still possible).