# FreedomBox/Manual/Shadowsocks

## SOCKS5 proxy (Shadowsocks)

### What is Shadowsocks?

Shadowsocks is a lightweight and secure SOCKS5 proxy, designed to protect your Internet traffic. It can be used to bypass Internet filtering and censorship. Your FreedomBox can run a Shadowsocks client which can connect to a Shadowsocks server. It will also run a SOCKS5 proxy. Local devices can connect to this proxy, and their data will be encrypted and proxied through the Shadowsocks server.

Note: Shadowsocks is available in FreedomBox starting with Plinth version 0.18.

### Using the Shadowsocks client?

The current implementation of Shadowsocks in FreedomBox only supports configuring FreedomBox as a Shadowsocks client. The current use case for Shadowsocks is as follows:

- Shadowsocks client (FreedomBox) is in a region where some parts of the Internet are blocked or censored.

- Shadowsocks server is in a different region, which doesn't have these blocks.

- The FreedomBox provides SOCKS proxy service on the local network for other devices to make use of its Shadowsocks connection.

At a future date it will be possible to configure FreedomBox as Shadowsocks server.

### Configuring your FreedomBox for the Shadowsocks client

To enable Shadowsocks, first navigate to the Socks5 Proxy (Shadowsocks) page and install it.

Server: the Shadowsocks server is not the FreedomBox IP or URL; rather, it will be another server or VPS that has been configured as a Shadowsocks server. There are also some public Shadowsocks servers listed on the web, but be aware that whoever operates the server can see where requests are going, and any non-encrypted data will be visible to them.

To use Shadowsocks after setup, set the SOCKS5 proxy URL in your device, browser or application to

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