Icon of program: Shadowsocks

Shadowsocks for Windows

  • Free
  • In English
  • V4.4.1.0
  • 3
  • (2)

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.

  • Pros

    • Protect your internet traffic
    • Free and open-source
    • Ultra-fast connection
    • Secured and flexible encryption
  • Cons

    • Can’t hide online identity
 0/3

App specs

Also available in other platforms

Program available in other languages


Icon of program: Shadowsocks

Shadowsocks for PC

  • Free
  • In English
  • V4.4.1.0
  • 3
  • (2)

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Laws concerning the use of this software vary from country to country. We do not encourage or condone the use of this program if it is in violation of these laws.
Softonic
Your review for Shadowsocks
Softonic

In Softonic we scan all the files hosted on our platform to assess and avoid any potential harm for your device. Our team performs checks each time a new file is uploaded and periodically reviews files to confirm or update their status. This comprehensive process allows us to set a status for any downloadable file as follows:

Clean

It’s extremely likely that this software program is clean.

What does this mean?

We have scanned the file and URLs associated with this software program in more than 50 of the world's leading antivirus services; no possible threat has been detected.

Warning

This software program is potentially malicious or may contain unwanted bundled software.

Why is the software program still available?

Based on our scan system, we have determined that these flags are possibly false positives.

What is a false positive?

It means a benign program is wrongfully flagged as malicious due to an overly broad detection signature or algorithm used in an antivirus program.

We’d like to highlight that from time to time, we may miss a potentially malicious software program. To continue promising you a malware-free catalog of programs and apps, our team has integrated a Report Software feature in every catalog page that loops your feedback back to us.

Flag any particular issues you may encounter and Softonic will address those concerns as soon as possible.

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