How DNS Tunnelling Works
The Simple Explanation
Imagine you're passing notes in class, but instead of writing them on paper, you hide them inside your homework that the teacher collects. The teacher (the censor) sees homework — not secret notes. That's essentially what DNS tunnelling does with your internet traffic.
What is DNS?
DNS (Domain Name System) is the internet's phone book. When you type google.com into your browser, your device asks a DNS server "what's the IP address for google.com?" and gets back an answer like 142.250.80.46. This happens thousands of times per day on every device connected to the internet.
How We Use DNS for Tunnelling
Instead of asking "what's the IP for google.com?", your phone sends a DNS query that contains a small piece of your encrypted internet traffic hidden inside the query. Our DNS server receives it, extracts your traffic, sends it to the real internet, gets the response, and sends it back to you — again hidden inside a DNS response.
To anyone watching your network, all they see is DNS queries and responses. There's nothing unusual about that — it's what every device does constantly.
Why Censors Can't Block It
DNS is fundamental to how the internet works. Every website, every app, every service needs DNS to function. If a government blocked all DNS traffic, their entire country's internet would stop working — no websites, no email, no apps, nothing. This makes DNS the perfect hiding place for VPN traffic.
The Trade-Off: Speed
DNS tunnelling is slower than regular VPN protocols. This is because:
- DNS queries have a limited size — each one can only carry a small amount of data
- Multiple DNS queries are needed to send and receive even a small amount of data
- The round-trip through DNS servers adds latency
For browsing, messaging, social media, and even standard-definition video, the speed is more than sufficient. For high-definition streaming or large file downloads, consider using NaiveProxy (which runs over HTTPS at much higher speeds) or Slipstream (the fastest DNS tunnel protocol).
Encryption
All data sent through the DNS tunnel is encrypted using Curve25519 keys before it's embedded in DNS queries. Even if someone could extract the data from the DNS queries, they would only see encrypted noise — not your actual internet traffic.