Avast SecureDNS & HTTPS Web Shield Problems... (Avast 2015)

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Hi All,

Got a response back from Lukas

Oliver, thank you. Several devs here are already looking into this bug. It is related to https scanner, but only indirectly – when https scanner is disabled, no processing is done on that particular connection and therefore no problems are visible. Currently it seems the problem is inside the http parser itself. We are able to reproduce it, so we are going to fix it soon.

 

Thanks again for reporting this, I’ll let you know about any progress.

So it seems Avast is on the case for fixing this bug.

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How do you disable SecureDNS in FREE ?
I installed V10 on one PC and it and other PCs not longer could see internet thru my router.
I only installed CUSTOM shields only but I saw SecureDNS with "?" without ability to not install.
I assume somewhere in settings this can be disabled ?....I'd like to see if that solves issue.

[Charyb-0]

How do you disable SecureDNS in FREE ?I installed V10 on one PC and it and other PCs not longer could see internet thru my router.I only installed CUSTOM shields only but I saw SecureDNS with "?" without ability to not install.I assume somewhere in settings this can be disabled ?....I'd like to see if that solves issue.

Secure DNS is not available in the free version.

[Lord_Ami]

How do you disable SecureDNS in FREE ?
I installed V10 on one PC and it and other PCs not longer could see internet thru my router.
I only installed CUSTOM shields only but I saw SecureDNS with "?" without ability to not install.
I assume somewhere in settings this can be disabled ?....I'd like to see if that solves issue.

SecureDNS is not offered for free version as far as I know. Only Premium version have it. That is why there is no box for it in installer.

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Ok if you do have the paid for version of Avast you can uninstall SecureDNS by going to the uninstaller and selecting it under the active protection tab.

Hope this helps.

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How do you disable SecureDNS in FREE ?
I installed V10 on one PC and it and other PCs not longer could see internet thru my router.
I only installed CUSTOM shields only but I saw SecureDNS with "?" without ability to not install.
I assume somewhere in settings this can be disabled ?....I'd like to see if that solves issue.

SecureDNS is not offered for free version as far as I know. Only Premium version have it. That is why there is no box for it in installer.

OK.....thx..........then I have no idea why when I installed V10 FREE on only one of my PCs that all of the other PCs in the house could no longer get onto the internet thru my Dlink router.  Once I uninstalled V10 from that PC all the other PCs (they have combo of V8 & V9 on them) could then get out to the internet.

[lukor]

OK.....thx..........then I have no idea why when I installed V10 FREE on only one of my PCs that all of the other PCs in the house could no longer get onto the internet thru my Dlink router.  Once I uninstalled V10 from that PC all the other PCs (they have combo of V8 & V9 on them) could then get out to the internet.

Wow, this is really scary and I must say unbelivable. Do you have to have the V10-PC running in order for the others to be blocked from the net?

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OK.....thx..........then I have no idea why when I installed V10 FREE on only one of my PCs that all of the other PCs in the house could no longer get onto the internet thru my Dlink router.  Once I uninstalled V10 from that PC all the other PCs (they have combo of V8 & V9 on them) could then get out to the internet.

Wow, this is really scary and I must say unbelivable. Do you have to have the V10-PC running in order for the others to be blocked from the net?

I did not try too much experimentation.........the machine is HP DM4 2Ghz so very fast....and I use Avast & MBAM Pro.....very clean.
I have DLink DIR655 Router.....four other PCs and even have Guest in house with MAC Pro notebook.
So, I did a CLEAN uninstall on V8.....installed V10 FREE (Custom, Shields Only)........came up OK at login and seemed a LITTLE slow.....not a lot.  I could immediately login to the internet and even tried my router....was OK.  Then after about few minutes the PC started to slow to almost unresponsive.  I tried to do CTRL-ALT-DEL for tasks manager to see what was taking the resources and it delayed so long that Windows said some message about this could not be launched, etc.....trying to get even Windows Explorer to come up was 15+ minutes.  I clicked on Avast 10 and console took 10 minutes to come up.  During all that time my guest on the MAC said she could not get on internet and I also tried other PCs.....all of which would not work.  The router activity LEDs were banging away with something going on.  So, I was not able to really do a reboot thru Windows so HARD reset and into safe mode where I uninstalled V10.  I then did a clean uninstall and now unless I can find the V9 offline installer will have to go back to V8 since I still have it.  Once the machine came back from reboot after uninstall all other PCs & MAC could now see internet.

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OK.....thx..........then I have no idea why when I installed V10 FREE on only one of my PCs that all of the other PCs in the house could no longer get onto the internet thru my Dlink router.  Once I uninstalled V10 from that PC all the other PCs (they have combo of V8 & V9 on them) could then get out to the internet.

Wow, this is really scary and I must say unbelivable. Do you have to have the V10-PC running in order for the others to be blocked from the net?

I did not try too much experimentation.........the machine is HP DM4 2Ghz so very fast....and I use Avast & MBAM Pro.....very clean.
I have DLink DIR655 Router.....four other PCs and even have Guest in house with MAC Pro notebook.
So, I did a CLEAN uninstall on V8.....installed V10 FREE (Custom, Shields Only)........came up OK at login and seemed a LITTLE slow.....not a lot.  I could immediately login to the internet and even tried my router....was OK.  Then after about few minutes the PC started to slow to almost unresponsive.  I tried to do CTRL-ALT-DEL for tasks manager to see what was taking the resources and it delayed so long that Windows said some message about this could not be launched, etc.....trying to get even Windows Explorer to come up was 15+ minutes.  I clicked on Avast 10 and console took 10 minutes to come up.  During all that time my guest on the MAC said she could not get on internet and I also tried other PCs.....all of which would not work.  The router activity LEDs were banging away with something going on.  So, I was not able to really do a reboot thru Windows so HARD reset and into safe mode where I uninstalled V10.  I then did a clean uninstall and now unless I can find the V9 offline installer will have to go back to V8 since I still have it.  Once the machine came back from reboot after uninstall all other PCs & MAC could now see internet.

In the future I would recommend attempting to ping your router to see if you can get a response.

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press the windows key + R, type CMD.exe, Then type ipconfig /all, You should see your default gateway ip address, note this down for future use. Then type Ping followed by your gateway's ip address. 
You should see that theres packets commuicating between the router, if not then something certainly has gone wrong. You can also ping the gateway from the mac using the network utility application (use the spotlight search to locate the program.) click ping and then input the default gateway, It will ping the same as your windows ping would.

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I would have pinged but could not even get command prompt to come up.....the system was SO slow.
As FYI, I do know my router & gateway IP address.

Seems a lot of other posts on V10 about WebShield & HTTPS scanning.
Could my issue have been that Avast 10 was out there scanning on this single PC so much links that it killed bandwidth at the router which blocked other PCs getting online ?  Also maybe this also killed my memory & CPU on the PC ?  I'm just reading various posts and connecting the dots....but perhaps not accurate.

Other datapoint is that I have SugarSync installed on this PC which at reboot checks to make sure all my files are synced with web.  I was able to EXIT out of this hoping that its closing would have helped the performance and/or web issue but it did not.

[lukor]

I would have pinged but could not even get command prompt to come up.....the system was SO slow.
As FYI, I do know my router & gateway IP address.

Seems a lot of other posts on V10 about WebShield & HTTPS scanning.
Could my issue have been that Avast 10 was out there scanning on this single PC so much links that it killed bandwidth at the router which blocked other PCs getting online ?  Also maybe this also killed my memory & CPU on the PC ?  I'm just reading various posts and connecting the dots....but perhaps not accurate.

Other datapoint is that I have SugarSync installed on this PC which at reboot checks to make sure all my files are synced with web.  I was able to EXIT out of this hoping that its closing would have helped the performance and/or web issue but it did not.

WebShield (with or without HTTPS Scanning) does not generate any traffic on its own, so it has not the capability to kill your bandwidth. Currently I have hard times imagine how this (and also anything else in current avast) could ever affect your (or anyone else's) other computers. If in doubt there is nothing easier that plug the computer of the ethernet socket for a while and see if the problem goes away.

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I have been experiencing intermittent issues which I believe are related to secure dns.

Windows 8 machine.  Name resolution would randomly stop working. 

The following were symptoms:

• Upon running command "ipconfig /release && ipconfig /renew" problem went away for about 30 seconds.  After that renewing an IP address made no difference (i.e. problem persisted).
• nslookup would not attach to listed dns server.  I was using google server 8.8.8.8 for testing purposes.  I could ping the address, however simultaneously could not perform nslookups.
• I have a router between my client and my firewall.  I ran a packet sniff on the port for all traffic destined to 8.8.8.8.  I could see my pings going through, however did not see my nslookup requests.
• I turned off secure dns under active protection in avast, still did not fix my problem.
• I turned off the avast firewall service under services.msc (I'm not sure, but I still don't think this fixed it)
• utilizing "netstat -on" I found numberous connections associated with a PID I later looked up via windows taskmanager.  This PID was associated with an avast service.  Upon ending this task I believe I was finally able to gain name resolution.
  

Thus, I believe my name resolution problems were directly related to avast, and likely related to securedns.

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Just an update.

After restarting avast firewall service "services.msc" I still had an error message in AVAST.  Something about Avast Background Services failed to start...  I am surmising this is why simply turning off "Secure DNS" did not immediately solve my problem.

Anyway, I have since stoped the "Secure DNS" feature in Active Protection.

I am hoping that a reboot of the computer with "Secure DNS" turned off will solve my problem long term.  It's hard to know however since the problem is intermittent...  Has happened two other times in the past few days.

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Yet another update....

It happened again.  I have still not rebooted the machine, so still a good test machine...

This time I went directly to services and stopped all 3 avast services. (Antivirus, Firewall, Vbox).  Upon restarting all 3 services problem immediately went away. (In fact the web page I was trying to access came up instantly without having to re-request).

I may have still been correct on my initial assumption that a reboot (or service restart) is still required for the disabling of "Secure DNS" to take effect.

If it happens again I will try to determine which of the 3 service restarts fixed the issue.

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This Avast Secure DNS setting is not a good thing to have if you have any type of parental controls on your network..

example, I use OpenDNS, and if "secure DNS" is enabled, it bypasses all filtration from OpenDNS and my network is free as a bird and anyone with this "secured DNS" feature enabled on their computers can go to any website they wish..

How can a piece of software like a Avast circumvent the DNS settings I have a t the router level? - I have even enabled "Intercept port 53" on my router which prevents users from using their own dns server..yet, Avast can bypass it like it was nothing.

Not very good Avast... not very good at all.