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
  • 3
    2
  • 4.6K
  • V4.4.1.0

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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.
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Is Shadowsocks safe?

100/100

Score result: Clean

This file passed a comprehensive security scan using VirusTotal technology. It is safe to download.

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Scan Info

Last scan
Tuesday, November 14, 2023
Scan provider
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File Integrity

File
Shadowsocks-4.4.1.0.zip
SHA256
62b74a688d22bfdf20f673a351580029d7b9de67c6facc9a5613b22b3f798968
SHA1
1aab2b5f41c1c90ba8024c5a8bb8f902e7600727

Softonic security commitment

Shadowsocks has been thoroughly scanned by our advanced security systems and verified by industry-leading partners. This file comes from the official developer and has passed all our security checks, showing no signs of viruses, malware, or spyware.