Glossary · Networking
DNS leak
When your DNS queries bypass the proxy and reveal your real network or location despite your visible IP being masked.
A DNS leak is a specific, common failure of anonymity. Your traffic routes through a proxy exactly as intended, but the domain lookups, the step that turns a hostname into an address, quietly go out through your own local resolver instead. A site or observer watching those lookups sees where you really are.
The damage is that the leak undoes the proxy without any visible sign. Your exit IP looks correct, everything appears to work, and yet the DNS trail tells the true story underneath. It is the kind of gap that only shows up when you deliberately test for it.
The fix is to force name resolution through the proxy, which SOCKS5 supports natively and which properly configured tooling does by default. The habit that catches it is verification: check what your DNS resolves to from behind the proxy, not just what your IP shows.
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