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About Stubby

Stubby is an application that acts as a local DNS Privacy stub resolver (using DNS-over-TLS). Stubby encrypts DNS queries sent from a client machine (desktop or laptop) to a DNS Privacy resolver increasing end user privacy. Stubby is in the early stages of development but is suitable for technical/advanced users. A more generally user-friendly version is on the way!

Stubby provides DNS Privacy by:

  • Running as a daemon
  • Listening on the loopback address to send all outgoing DNS queries received on that address out over TLS
  • Using a default configuration which provides Strict Privacy and uses a subset of the available DNS Privacy servers

Stubby is developed by the getdns team.

Documentation

See Stubby Homepage for more details

Dependencies

Stubby uses getdns and requires the 1.2 release of getdns or later.

It also requires yaml.

Installing Using a Package Manager

Check to see if stubby, getdns and yaml are available via a package manager for your system: https://repology.org/metapackage/stubby/versions https://repology.org/metapackage/getdns/versions https://repology.org/metapackage/libyaml/versions

  • A Windows Installer is now available for Stubby.
  • A Homebrew package for stubby is now available (brew install stubby).
  • A GUI for macOS is also available for testing

If you need to install getdns from source, see the section at the end of this document.

Build Stubby from source

Get the code:

git clone https://github.com/getdnsapi/stubby.git

Build and install (the paths below assume that getdns and libyaml are installed in a standard location e.g. by Homebrew in /usr/local/)

cd stubby
autoreconf -vfi
./configure CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include" LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib"
make
sudo make install

Configure Stubby

It is recommended to use the default configuration file provided which will use 'Strict' privacy mode and spread the DNS queries among several of the current DNS Privacy test servers. Note that this file contains both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. This file is installed on *nix systems as /usr/local/etc/stubby/stubby.yml

The configuration file format is a YAML like format and the name of the file must have an extension of .yml. Essentially the configuration options available are the same as the options that can be set on a getdns context - Doxygen documentation for which is available here. To aid with creating a custom configuration file, an example is given below.

NOTE: As of the 0.1.3 release of Stubby the YAML format replaces the JSON like format used in earlier versions of the configuration file for getdns/stubby. The YAML format is more human readable and supports comments allowing options to be easily enabled and disabled. The JSON format is that which is used internally in getdns (it is the same as the output returned by stubby -i) and is still available by directly specifying a file with the name 'stubby.conf' on the command line using the -C option.

Create Custom Configuration File

Alternatively the configuration file location can be specified on the command line using the -C flag. Changes to the configuration file require a restart of Stubby.

The config file below will configure Stubby in the following ways:

  • resolution_type: Work in stub mode only (not recursive mode) - required for Stubby operation.
  • dns_transport_list: Use TLS only as a transport (no fallback to UDP or TCP).
  • tls_authentication: Use Strict Privacy i.e. require a TLS connection and authentication of the upstream
  • If Opportunistic mode is desired, simply remove the tls_authentication: GETDNS_AUTHENTICATION_REQUIRED field. In Opportunistic mode authentication of the nameserver is not required and fallback to clear text transports is permitted if they are in the dns_transport_list.
  • tls_query_padding_blocksize: Use the EDNS0 padding option to pad DNS queries to hide their size
  • edns_client_subnet_private: Use EDNS0 Client Subnet privacy so the client subnet is not sent to authoritative servers
  • idle_timeout: Use an EDNS0 Keepalive idle timeout of 10s unless overridden by the server. This keeps idle TLS connections open to avoid the overhead of opening a new connection for every query.
  • listen_address: have the Stubbby daemon listen on IPv4 and IPv6 on port 53 on the loopback address
  • round_robin_upstreams: Round robin queries across all the configured upstream servers. Without this option Stubby will use each upstream server sequentially until it becomes unavailable and then move on to use the next.
  • upstream_recursive_servers: Use the NLnet labs test DNS Privacy Server for outgoing queries. In Strict Privacy mode, at least one of the following is required for each nameserver:
  • tls_auth_name: This is the authentication domain name that will be verified against the presented certificate.
  • tls_pubkey_pinset: The sha256 SPKI pinset for the server. This is also verified against the presented certificate.
resolution_type: GETDNS_RESOLUTION_STUB
dns_transport_list: 
  - GETDNS_TRANSPORT_TLS
tls_authentication: GETDNS_AUTHENTICATION_REQUIRED
tls_query_padding_blocksize: 256
edns_client_subnet_private : 1
idle_timeout: 10000
listen_addresses:
  - 127.0.0.1
  -  0::1
round_robin_upstreams: 1
upstream_recursive_servers:
  - address_data: 185.49.141.38
    tls_auth_name: "getdnsapi.net"
    tls_pubkey_pinset:
      digest: "sha256"
       value: foxZRnIh9gZpWnl+zEiKa0EJ2rdCGroMWm02gaxSc9Q=

Additional privacy servers can be specified by adding more entries to the upstream_recursive_servers list above (note a separate entry must be made for the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses of a given server. More DNS Privacy test servers are listed here.

A custom port can be specified by adding the tls_port: attribute to the upstream_recursive_server in the config file.

More details can be found in the comments in the default configuration file and at https://dnsprivacy.org/wiki/display/DP/Configuring+Stubby

Run Stubby

Simply invoke Stubby on the command line. By default it runs in the foreground, the -g flag runs it in the background.

> sudo stubby

Or, to let it run as an unprivileged user:

> sudo setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' /usr/local/bin/stubby
> stubby
  • Enable connection logging by using the -l flag. The logging is currently simplistic and simply writes to stdout. (We are working on making this better!)
  • A custom configuration file can be specified using the -C flag.
  • The pid file is /usr/local/var/run/stubby.pid

Platform specific management

The Windows and macOS installers include scripts to run stubby as a managed daemon. We have basic support for using systemd to manage Stubby, see systemd

Test Stubby

A quick test can be done by using dig (or your favourite DNS tool) on the loopback address

> dig @127.0.0.1 www.example.com
> getdns_query -s @127.0.0.1 www.example.com

Modify your upstream resolvers

!!! Once this change is made your DNS queries will be re-directed to Stubby and sent over TLS!
(You may need to restart some applications to have them pick up the network settings).

You can monitor the traffic using Wireshark watching on port 853.

For Stubby to re-send outgoing DNS queries over TLS the system stub resolvers on your machine must be changed to send all the local queries to the loopback interface on which Stubby is listening. This depends on the operating system being run. It is useful to note your existing default nameservers before making this change!

Linux/Unix systems

  • Edit the /etc/resolv.conf file
  • Comment out the existing nameserver entries
  • Add the following (only add the IPv4 address if you don't have IPv6) 
    nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver ::1

OS X

A script is provided with Stubby for easier configuration. From the command line you can do the following to switch all your queries to use Stubby

> sudo /usr/local/sbin/stubby-setdns-macos.sh

If you want to reset, just use:

> sudo /usr/local/sbin/stubby-setdns-macos.sh -r

which should pick up the default DHCP nameservers.

You can add /usr/local/sbin to your path to avoid having to type it above by doing

export PATH=/usr/local/sbin:$PATH

Or via the GUI:

  • Open System Preferences → Network → Advanced → DNS
  • Use the '-' button to remove the existing nameservers
  • Use the '+' button to add 127.0.0.1 and ::1 (only add the IPv4 address if you don't have IPv6)
  • Hit 'OK' in the DNS pane and then 'Apply' on the Network pane

Windows 8 and later

Powershell scripts are provided in the the windows directory of the source code that can be used to update the system resolvers. Instructions for how to update the resolvers manually are provided are also provided - see https://dnsprivacy.org/wiki/display/DP/Windows+installer+for+Stubby

Notes:

  • If Stubby works for a while but you then see failures from Stubby such as "None of the configured upstreams could be used to send queries on the specified transports" try restarting Stubby.
  • If you are using a DNS Privacy server that does not support concurrent processing of TLS queries, you may experience some issues due to timeouts causing subsequent queries on the same connection to fail.

Building getdns from Source

Note that from getdns 1.1.3 stubby is included in the getdns code as a git submodule. Therefore stubby and getdns can be built together by following the instructions below but adding the --with-stubby flag to the configure step.

Dependencies

The most limited install of getdns that will work with Stubby requires only OpenSSL as a dependency (version 1.0.2 or later is required for hostname authentication to be supported). If OpenSSL is installed in a non-standard location on your system use the --with-ssl option to configure below to specify where it is installed.

Linux

It may be necessary to install 1.0.2 from source for most Linux distros.

OS X

It is recommended to install OpenSSL using homebrew, in which case use the following in the configure line in the build step below:

--with-ssl=/usr/local/opt/openssl/

Download the getdns source

Either clone the code:

> git clone https://github.com/getdnsapi/getdns.git
> cd getdns
> git checkout master

for the very latest version of getdns or grab a release tarball from this page: Latest getdns releases

Build the code

Note that on Mac OS X you will need the developer tools from Xcode to compile the code. And you may need to use brew to install libtool, autoconf, and automake.

> git submodule update --init
> libtoolize -ci
> autoreconf -fi
> mkdir build
> cd build
> ../configure --prefix=<install_location> --without-libidn --without-libidn2 
> make
> sudo make install

Use the --enable-stub-only flag with configure IF you want remove the dependency on libunbound for getdns for some reason (Stubby works fine when getdns is built like this but beware this limits the functions of the getdns library as a generic system component and should be used with care).

Logging/debugging

--enable-debug-stub If you do want to see very detailed debug information as messages are processed then add the --enable-debug-stub option to the configure line above (not recommended for use with Stubby)