Safeguard your internet traffic

Widely used in mainland China, Shadowsocks is a free and open-source utility tool developed by a Chinese programmer named clowwindy in 2012. It has a worldwide community that’s devoted to delivering bug-free code and long-term support. This security and privacy software connects you to a third-party socks5 proxy that is designed to protect your internet traffic. It’s quite similar to an SSH tunnel but, more powerful as it can also proxy UDP traffic.

Fast and Flexible

Shadowsocks provides an ultra-fast connection that utilizes bleeding-edge techniques with the use of asynchronous I/O and event-driven programming. It gives off a highly-secured and industry level encryption algorithm that is also flexible to support custom algorithms. Moreover, many package manager systems such as pip, aur, and fresh posts can be easily deployed here.

This open-source program also supports HTTP proxy, server auto-switching, UDP relay, and plugins. The auto-switching of servers can be sorted by the load balance which is chosen randomly, high availability which selects the best sever, and lastly, selecting by total package loss. If you want to use the latter, you must enable ‘Availability Statistics’ in the menu.

For UDP, you will need to use a SocksCap or ProxyCap to force programs you want to be proxied to tunnel over this tool. If you wish to connect to a server through a plugin, you must set the plugin’s path—relative or absolute—on the Edit Servers form. Bear in mind that one of the system requirements for this software tool to work properly is Microsoft .NET Framework 4.7.2 or higher as well as Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable.

Excellent encryption protocol project

Shadowsocks does an exemplary job especially at protecting your internet traffic. It provides an ultra-fast connection as well as highly-secured and flexible encryption. It also supports many package management systems that can easily be deployed. Just make sure that you meet all the required requirements for this to properly work.