sing-box VS iodine

Compare sing-box vs iodine and see what are their differences.

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sing-box iodine
6 58
13,658 5,790
11.5% -
9.7 5.1
7 days ago 5 months ago
Go C
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later ISC License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

sing-box

Posts with mentions or reviews of sing-box. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-01.

iodine

Posts with mentions or reviews of iodine. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-05.
  • Show HN: This Website Is Hosted on DNS
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Feb 2024
    Reminds me of using https://code.kryo.se/iodine/ ( DNS tunnel ) and a empty prepaid card...
  • DNS Exfiltration Tool
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Dec 2023
    Obligatory dns tunnel software for exfil. It is super noisy if you do dns querylogging, so I'd not use it for anything major, but it is a fun research tool.

    https://github.com/yarrick/iodine

  • Fun with DNS TXT Records
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Nov 2023
    It's worth noting that you (re) invented what iodine does: https://code.kryo.se/iodine/
  • WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Sep 2023
    (https://github.com/yarrick/iodine)

    It’s slow, but it works and is a handy “last resort” tool.

  • Russia starts blocking VPN at the protocol (WireGuard, OpenVPN) level
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Aug 2023
    While working in an environment where VPN connections were pretty much all blocked⁰ a friend of mine had success using https://guacamole.apache.org/ to access a remote machine¹. Not quite the same as a direct VPN connection but worth a try if nothing else functions, it looks enough like normal HTTPS traffic that he got away with it.

    To keep your wireguard setup more as-is, you could try https://kirill888.github.io/notes/wireguard-via-websocket/ to tunnel that via a web server. In fact https://github.com/erebe/wstunnel which that uses could be used just as well with any other UDP based VPN.

    I once tinkered with https://github.com/yarrick/iodine and successfully connected to resources over the wireless on a train, bypassing its traffic capture and sign-up requirement, so that might be an option, though I think fully blocking external DNS is more common now so this is less likely to work²³.

    --

    [0] practically only HTTP(S) permitted, not even SSH, DPI in use that detected just using SSH or OpenVPN over port 443

    [1] NOTE: be careful breaching restrictions like this, you are at risk of an insta-sacking if discovered, or worse if operating in some securiry environments!

    [2] and the latency when it does work is significant!

    [3] and that much traffic over port 53 might get noticed by the heuristics of data exfiltration scanner, encouraging sysadmins to notice and implement a way to block it

  • Show HN: File distribution over DNS: (ab)using DNS as a CDN
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Jul 2023
    There's also iodine, a C program that tunnels IPv4 packets over DNS. Useful for bypassing captive portals on wifi, since DNS usually isn't restricted.

    https://github.com/yarrick/iodine

    Regarding cloudflare DNS over HTTPS: It could be that it tries to server data encoded as JSON, which is impossible in JSON. Some control characters and bytes 128-255 cannot be represented as JSON strings.

  • Show HN: Use DNS TXT to share information
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jul 2023
    A regular proxy on port 53 might work? Is it necessary to actually use DNS?

    Otherwise there's https://github.com/yarrick/iodine

  • Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough
    4 projects | /r/programming | 4 Jun 2023
  • help with choosing a VPN to host (I'll explain)
    2 projects | /r/selfhosted | 23 May 2023
    Well, you're really exhausting your options here (and possibly your IT department's patience). Iodine would still be an option, it creates a tunnel through DNS traffic. Nearly impossible to block/filter out but you shouldn't expect a lot of bandwidth. Try it out! Although if you're only going to use low-bandwidth applications through the tunnel anyway you might as well use your own mobile data plan instead of your school's WLAN.
  • DNS blacklisting in enterprise
    1 project | /r/networking | 5 May 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing sing-box and iodine you can also consider the following projects:

nekoray - Qt based cross-platform GUI proxy configuration manager (backend: v2ray / sing-box)

dnscat2

Clash.Meta - A rule-based tunnel in Go.

miniProxy

Xray-core - Xray, Penetrates Everything. Also the best v2ray-core, with XTLS support. Fully compatible configuration.

PHP-Proxy - Proxy Application built on php-proxy library ready to be installed on your server

hysteria - Hysteria is a powerful, lightning fast and censorship resistant proxy.

Nginx Proxy Manager - Docker container for managing Nginx proxy hosts with a simple, powerful interface

Xray-examples - Some examples of uses for Xray-core.

inlets - Get public TCP LoadBalancers for local Kubernetes clusters

v2ray-core - A platform for building proxies to bypass network restrictions.

Swiperproxy - A Python-based HTTP/HTTPS-proxy.