Magic-Wormhole – Get things from one computer to another, safely

https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole

by lelf • 9 years ago

744 179 9 years ago

github.com

the_cat_kittles• 9 years ago

the motivations are great:

"Moving a file to a friend's machine, when the humans can speak to each other (directly) but the computers cannot

Delivering a properly-random password to a new user via the phone

Supplying an SSH public key for future login use"

i had never even thought about those, and this is a great solution afaik

pmontra• 9 years ago

Supplying an SSH public key for future login use

It's public so it can be emailed in cleartext to the admin of the server, copied in any instant messenger or painted on walls. It's the secret key that ensures all the security of the connection.

vbernat• 9 years ago

It still needs to be authenticated. It could be replaced by an attacker public key.

jedisct1• 9 years ago

Also, Piknik: https://github.com/jedisct1/piknik

lotharrr15• 9 years ago

Nice! It might be interesting to use the magic-wormhole API to set up the piknik keys. In the long term, I'm pushing magic-wormhole to serve as a provisioning tool for other (more persistent) connections.

Sphax• 9 years ago

Cool stuff, thanks.

schoen2• 9 years ago

This reminds me of the great tool http://www.fefe.de/ncp/, which seems like the same thing only without the cryptographic authentication!

lima• 9 years ago

Why the downvotes? ncp is really useful for hacker space like environments.

lotharrr15• 9 years ago

Nifty.. I'll look at the network side of that, maybe we can steal some ideas. At the moment magic-wormhole depends upon one of:

* at least one side has a public IP address * both sides are on the same (private) LAN * a TURN-like "Transit Relay" server that I run

That transit server hasn't gotten a worrysome amount of traffic yet, but it's a potential scaling problem. (Fortunately the two sides can offer their own transit servers, and they negotiate the one to use, so it's also not a difficult scaling problem to address).

In the long run I'm hoping to get some NAT-hole-punching tools, maybe WebRTC, to reduce the need for the transit relay somewhat. Also in the long run, if both sides are using Tor, then one of then can run an onion service, which gets you the NAT-punching for free.

schoen2• 9 years ago

If I remember correctly, ncp only works on LANs (using local segment broadcast), so it doesn't require either side to have any Internet connectivity at all. Your approach would be a lot more flexible, but I bet people would also appreciate it if you could figure out a LAN-only mode -- for better privacy, and when the Internet connection is down. Maybe you could start with an ncp-style segment broadcast and then fall back to the transit relay server if nothing on the segment answers and begins negotiation?

samstave• 9 years ago

Uh... just an idea: can you leverage the cloud flare infra challenge for the transit server piece?

rakoo• 9 years ago

If you're willing to go the webrtc route for the transport, you might as well look into webtorreny that does everything for you already.

llamataboot• 9 years ago

Waiting for the security nits, but this looks awesome and I have use cases for it every week

canada_dry• 9 years ago

Ditto. This would be very useful if it were available on all platforms (Android, OIS, Rpi)!

monocasa• 9 years ago

OIS?

astrodust• 9 years ago

Extending this to a small text-based GUI with chat could make it a lot more useful, too. Sort of like a person-to-person BBS.

foota3• 9 years ago

How is the 16 bit wormhole code secure against brute force?

meejah4• 9 years ago

Any attacker only gets a single guess

0x04• 9 years ago

What if there are 65535 active send requests? Perhaps of which 65534 are opened by an attacker?

Thespian2• 9 years ago

Trusting the baked-in rendezvous server would seem to be the most obvious security "nit," which could be addressed by compiling and running your own server. But out-of-the-box, that would seem to be a weak-point for MitM attack.

api• 9 years ago

A similar LAN or virtual network oriented tool:

https://github.com/zerotier/toss

... and another less magical one:

http://www.fefe.de/ncp/

cestith3• 9 years ago

What's wrong with S/MIME? Email doesn't have to be unencrypted.

Also, you only need to send the public part of an SSH key to the remote end to set up future keyed connections to that system.

This seems like a solution with very narrow problems to solve.

prophesi3• 9 years ago

Ok, I'll bite. From the project page: "Copying files through email first requires transcribing an email address in the opposite direction, and is even worse for secrets, because email is unencrypted. Copying files through encrypted email requires bootstrapping a GPG key as well as an email address."

And S/MIME is essentially PGP/GPG, except you bootstrap the key from a central Certificate Authority. So yes, it's still a hassle.

As for SSH, how would /you/ place the public key on /their/ remote end? That's a bit of a chicken and the egg problem right there, don't you think?

cestith3• 9 years ago

Since it's a public key, how about via unencrypted email?

nsxwolf• 9 years ago

I would use this just to cut and paste text from my host machine to my VMs, because I've never been able to get that seemingly simple concept to work reliably.

rplnt• 9 years ago

I think Synergy does that as well.

chx3• 9 years ago

I like using https://file.pizza/ for this.

d4l3k• 9 years ago

Also https://instant.io/

chx3• 9 years ago

I like this one but it becomes truly ardous to copy a magnet from one computer to the other. file.pizza at least uses easily pronounceable hashes.

What I would to see from this is a JS which serves every asset on a site via webtorrent so visitors are sharing the bandwidth costs.

fiatjaf• 9 years ago

file.pizza always fails, while instant.io doesn't.

superkuh• 9 years ago

file.pizza requires WebRTC support so I can't use it.

pscsbs• 9 years ago

I prefer https://www.justbeamit.com/

chx3• 9 years ago

OK I will try to remember this one, it's neat, "dba9q" is not too horrible, a plane ticket PNR is worse.

curtis• 9 years ago

The receiving side offers tab-completion on the codewords...

Nice.

ohhhlol2• 9 years ago

The wormhole library requires a "Rendezvous Server": a simple WebSocket-based relay that delivers messages from one client to another. This allows the wormhole codes to omit IP addresses and port numbers. The URL of a public server is baked into the library for use as a default, and will be freely available until volume or abuse makes it infeasible to support.

why not make use of https://docs.syncthing.net/users/strelaysrv.html ? lots of servers http://relays.syncthing.net/

lotharrr15• 9 years ago

Interesting.. I'll take a look at it. My first thought is that magic-wormhole needs a canonical way to allocate "nameplates" (the numeric channel identifier at the start of the wormhole code), and that's tricky to do in a DHT (I'm assuming syncthing's relay server behaves like a DHT).

We've got a ticket open (https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole/issues/72) about distributing this rendezvous server.. I'll add a note to check out syncthing.

ohhhlol2• 9 years ago

hiq2• 9 years ago

Why would I use magic worm-hole instead of Syncthing or Signal? They are both user-friendly and easy to install for the person I want to send the file to. The only shortcomings I can imagine:

_AFAIR Signal has a size limit on the file you can send

_you need a phone number and a smartphone to use Signal

_The Synching key you have to share is complicated, but sending it via email and making sure you add the hosts quickly on both sides would provide enough security guarantees for most people. If you have a secure messenger then you can simply share the key through this channel. And overall I find it easier to explain how to

1) install Signal

2) install Syncthing and share the keys

rather than install magic-wormhole and use some passphrase.

ComodoHacker2• 9 years ago

You can also fallback to Tox or other existing public P2P network.

BrandiATMuhkuh• 9 years ago

You can also use https://ondevice.io for that. But in that case it let's you ssh into the remote device even if it changes location/ip-address. I use it for some IoT tinkering I do.

allworknoplay• 9 years ago

The security model here is pretty great assuming you trust the rendezvous server.

Maybe consider an optional challenge/response prompt (like when your pal enters the prompt code, their client generates a second code that they give back to you) to make sure nobody's intercepted the request before them, odds aside (if someone got your initial code somehow, they could definitely man in the middle the request otherwise).

lotharrr15• 9 years ago

If I did things right, the rendezvous server shouldn't get any advantage over a network attacker: one guess per invocation of the program, 1-out-of-65536 chance of getting it right, 65535-out-of-65536 chance of giving you a WrongPasswordError.

FWIW, there's also a --verify option, which causes the program to print out a hex hash of the session key, and wait for you to approve it before sending anything. Not as ergonomic, but it removes the MitM threat pretty effectively.

benzinschleuder5• 9 years ago

Does the session key hash help if the attacker guessed the code correctly?

falcolas3• 9 years ago

Call me a nerdy hipster, but I prefer my 1-in-2^256 chance with AES encryption. Then I can put it, well, anywhere. Including a thumb drive, google drive, S3, email, or even some random public newsgroup.

I realize this complicates things a touch - you need a program to encrypt and decrypt the file - but that seems much more secure.

huhtenberg2• 9 years ago

a --verify option, which causes the program to print out a hex hash of the session key

This is plenty enough.

Another option is to use the ssh model whereby the sender has a persistent keypair, uses it to sign the handshake and sends the pub key to the peer. If the peer has this key in its key cache, it proceeds quietly. Otherwise it pops up a "New key, please verify and approve" message before proceeding.

collinmanderson• 9 years ago

Isn't it more like a <number of pending transfers>-out-of-65536 chance of getting it right? If there are 256 pending transfers, then it's more of a 1 in 256 chance of stealing someone's information?

The more popular this program gets, the easier it is to steal people's information?

dang• 9 years ago

Discussed in 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9953767.

grizzles2• 9 years ago

Cool. Does the data transit the server, or does it do NAT / UPNP type stuff for direct comms after the initial rendezvous?

lotharrr15• 9 years ago

The two sides exchange IP addresses (inside the encrypted channel), and try to connect to all of them. If that fails to produce a successful handshake, they fall back to a "Transit Relay Server" that I run. So they'll manage a direct connection if one of the machines has a public IP address, or if they're both on the same LAN.

I'm hoping to add NAT/UPnP support, but it's not there yet.. still looking for an easy library with Python support.

falcolas3• 9 years ago

What happens when your transit server's bandwidth bill gets out of hand because someone is transferring a few TB of data to their backup host? (see article a few days back about someone griping about their 13 TB backups on Backblaze if you aren't sure this is a real thing)

devindotcom• 9 years ago

Nice, this looks useful and extensible! I popped it up on TC, I like the idea of transferring files wizard-style.

http://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/magic-wormhole-is-a-clever-...

dak1• 9 years ago

How does this compare to AirDrop (besides obviously being cross platform)?

benzinschleuder5• 9 years ago

It operates over the Internet instead of Wi-Fi / Bluetooth and it initializes transfers by a code.

lotharrr15• 9 years ago

AirDrop: waaaay better UI, awesome animated drag-and-drop, dead-simple to use, works offline. Not so strong at clearly identifying who the file came from or is going to. Not clear what sort of integrity/confidentiality properties you get (probably better than nothing, knowing Apple, but since the send-to-which-device picker UI shows their self-selected names, there's not any obvious way to distinguish between the real "Alice's iPhone" sitting next to you and the attacker who's within bluetooth range.

Magic-Wormhole: CLI only (so far), no OS integration anywhere, better security properties. Also it's got a spiffy wizard-hat logo (thanks Katie!).

dexzod• 9 years ago

Interesting. Would it be possible to use it on Android and IOS?

daxorid• 9 years ago

So, basically, scp (with a 16-bit session key that has to be exchanged oob)?

tonyhb2• 9 years ago

or, like, netcat? `nc -l -p 8888 > foo` to listen, `nc 10.10.10.1 8888 < tail -500 /dev/random` to send.

Still cool though :)

lotharrr15• 9 years ago

yup, except with netcat:

* the network-side attacker gets to see and modify all your data * the receiver must have a public IP address * the receiver must tell something to the sender, which is the opposite of the direction the data will flow * you have to transcribe your IP address and port number to the other person, which I always get wrong (so many meaningless numbers!) * you don't get much confirmation that all the data arrived, or that it arrived accurately

The wormhole code uses a wordlist that was carefully designed (not by me.. I'm using the PGP wordlist, as used by PGPfone and Zfone) for accurate spoken transcription in noisy environments. So it's more likely that they'll type in the right thing.

lotharrr15• 9 years ago

Yeah, if you've already gotten a public key set up (and an account on the target machine), then scp is much easier and completely secure. magic-wormhole is more aimed at situations where you don't yet have that pubkey copied over. Or where your receipient doesn't want to give you an entire account just to receive a single file.

In fact there's a mode (kinda experimental right now) to use magic-wormhole to transfer an ssh pubkey into the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on a new account. Ideally your site admin should be able to give you access to a new machine with a wormhole code, instead of having you email them a pubkey.

vacri2• 9 years ago

scp requires additional network routing config to get it past a NAT, which is most residential internet.

bhenc3• 9 years ago

Copying files with ssh/scp is fine, but requires previous arrangements and an account on the target machine, and how do you bootstrap the account?~

Assuming that you have openssh and rssh installed, you bootstrap like this: useradd -m -g users -s /usr/bin/rssh tmp passwd tmp edit /etc/rssh.conf and uncomment allowscp Share the password with the party you want to exchange data with. Make sure your ports are open.

See: https://serverfault.com/questions/197545/can-non-login-accou...

The use case I see for wormhole is if you're working purely in the python ecosystem. That's it.

You're free to disagree of course, but I prefer ssh, since it's peer-to-peer end-to-end encrypted, and extends to cover other use cases much more easily (rsync, VNC, etc.).

mschuster91• 9 years ago

When both parties are in a corp network (eg across companies) you would need a server anyway. Many either offer a FTP server or have switched to Accellion (which is kinda cr.p, and full of security holes)... so this is a nice, fast and secure alternative.

bhenc3• 9 years ago

That is a good use case.

adrianN• 9 years ago

When both parties are in a corporate network their IT policy would forbid using magic wormhole. They'd have to use the file-transfer program managed by their IT department.

dmd• 9 years ago

you bootstrap like this

Ah, yes. oh come on please it's easy just /etc/init.apt-get/frob-set-conf --arc=0 - +/lib/syn.${SETDCONPATH}.so.4.2 even my grandma can do that

chairmanwow• 9 years ago

I would like to highlight the quality of the satire in your comment.

skocznymroczny• 9 years ago

Classic, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

bb884• 9 years ago

Okay.

Step 1. Open ports on your router. It's your job to figure out which ports those may be.

Step 2. Redirect said ports to the box in question, hopefully you'll know the ip address that was assigned by your home router's DHCP

Step 3. Make sure rssh is installed.

Step 4. If rssh is not installed, please simply follow the simple instructions to get it installed for your system.

Step 4a. If it's a mac, use brew. Type brew install rssh

Step 4b. If it'a a redhat system, type yum install rssh

Step 4c. If it's an ubuntu system, type apt-get install rssh

Step 4d. If step 4b and step 4c fail, use sudo.

Step 5. Get the external facing ip address, and give it to your friend. Note that this is different than the internal address that you used in step 2.

Step 6. Create an account on your system, using rssh, and allowing sftp

Step 7. Give him the username/password

Step 8. Copy the file into his account

Step 8a. Don't forget to chmod it so he can read it.

Step 9. Tell him to get the file

Step 10. Remove the account from /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow and remove him from /etc/groups. Also delete his home directory

Step 11. Rejoice in the simplicity.

falcolas3• 9 years ago

Instead you get to pip install. But pip isn't installed. easy-install pip? What's easy-install - it's not there? (brew|yum|apt-get) disttools. Forget this... download get_pip.py, run python get_pip.py... Some error about libsodium now? Where do I get gcc for Windows 10 again?

Python's greatest weakness is its packaging and distribution, and this project makes no effort to make it simple.

seanp2k2• 9 years ago

UPnP could have helped with the router bits and dynamic DNS could help with the internal/external bits. https://upnp-portmapper.sourceforge.io is fun but UPnP isn't enabled everywhere reliably, and explaining how to do that + ensure it's working is probably only going to work for someone who would know what homebrew is.

AirDrop is cool in theory but works about 20% of the time for me. In 2017, the best way to send someone a large file is still to upload it somewhere then give them the link to it. https://getdropsha.re and similar stuff makes that easy enough that your non-technical relatives can use it successfully.

bhenc3• 9 years ago

Okay.

The equivalents to steps 1-11 were done by the Wormhole authors when they created the rendezvous server. So yes, if you use Wormhole in SaaS mode, it's simpler, but you have to trust the rendezvous server.

Operating scp with a working ssh server is as simple as working with wormhole:

To push:

scp foobar.txt tmp@www.example.com: #equivalent to wormhole send

To pull:

scp tmp@www.example.com:foobar.txt . #equivalent to wormhole receive

To revoke access, you simply change the password, instead of deleting the user account. In fact, the steps you mention are what I already have by default on most of my machines, so there's 0% extra effort. I got rssh working in five minutes.

Steps 10/11 are my responsibility, and the only remaining step for the other developer is step 7.

Compare explaining the above two commands to explaining virtualenv and pip. On a busy public IRC channel, I'm not going to do that, I'll use scp, since it's also preinstalled on their system.

So yes, I do rejoice in the simplicity.

I commented for the benefit of those already running ssh, and who wondered how to create a similar setup to wormhole with what they have. rssh will work fine.

dagw3• 9 years ago

You forgot "Step 4a.1" Go to brew.sh and follow the instructions to install brew.

zwischenzug• 9 years ago

Surprised no-one has mentioned socat ('netcat on steroids') in this context, which is what I use to quickly transfer files, especially in closed network contexts.

d0mine• 9 years ago

You can use ssh/scp in pure Python (e.g., StaSh on Pythonista for iOS provides scp/ssh commands).

penetrarthur• 9 years ago

And Dropbox is just an FTP server with SVN.

mcrmonkey• 9 years ago

There are some handy docker images for this over on the docker hub if you want to try them and dont have/want the needed python setup but just happen to have docker installed

abhinai• 9 years ago

Interesting. How does this compare to WebRTC based peer-to-peer file transfer like perhaps https://simplewebrtc.com/filetransfer as an example?

hossbeast• 9 years ago

The wormhole library requires a "Rendezvous Server": a simple WebSocket-based relay that delivers messages from one client to another.

bob10293• 9 years ago

I would highly recommend looking into this (seemingly-obscure) technique for NAT hole punching: https://samy.pl/pwnat/

It would allow for a "magic wormhole"-style system without the need for a MITM (trusted or otherwise).

voltagex_• 9 years ago

How likely is it that something like that trick makes IDS go crazy?

bob10293• 9 years ago

Probably moderate with this specific technique, but I imagine you could use some simpler method where each end of the transfer is willing to share their public IP. This would reduce the problem to UDP hole punching/scanning across some pre-defined port range and then running whatever traffic you need through that pipe. I feel like this would look less "suspicious" to an IDS than crafting odd-looking ICMP packets.

Animats• 9 years ago

That's cute. But will it work if you have two sessions behind the same NAT trying to use it?

huhtenberg2• 9 years ago

Both pwnat and chownat are very clever techniques, but I have massive doubts they work _well_ in practice, when exposed to hundreds (or even dozens) of popular NAT devices and network configurations.

Vast majority of NAT boxes change the source port on outbound packets even if a respective externally-facing port is not yet allocated. Anything that's BSD derived will randomize the port, lots and lots of others will +1 the port for each new session, thirds will +2 the port, etc.

There's also egress filtering, intrusion detection systems and NAT devices that do things that make little sense such as remapping ID field in the IP header, presumably for security reasons. Also, depending on the OS, this will need root privileges to craft fake ICMP packets.

All in all, pwnat/chownat are essentially very cool "tech demos" that can't be realistically used just on their own and require a conventional rendezvous server as a fallback.

bob10293• 9 years ago

Yeah these are excellent points. I think the biggest blocker is definitely the symmetric NAT case, since this would still be a problem even if both sides already knew the public IP of the other end...

I wonder if there is still some opportunity to find workarounds in this space. I did see some papers on prediction of the external ports based on local port and NAT vendor, but this is obviously not going to work for a no-bs-magic-wormhole-style solution.

etanol• 9 years ago

Copying files onto a USB stick requires physical proximity, and is uncomfortable for transferring long-term secrets because flash memory is hard to erase. Copying files with ssh/scp is fine, but requires previous arrangements and an account on the target machine, and how do you bootstrap the account? Copying files through email first requires transcribing an email address in the opposite direction

I had similar motivations in 2006 to write a tool to copy files "point to point". So here's my shameless plug:

https://bitbucket.org/etanol/canute

In my case, cryptography was not a requirement, though.

ReverseCold• 9 years ago

I expected something local, like airdrop, but cross platform. (someone, please)

miles• 9 years ago

Sounds like Dukto: http://www.msec.it/blog/?page_id=11

Supports Windows (XP and up), OS X/macOS (10.6 and up), Linux (packages for Ububtu and Fedora), and Symbian. Ports available for iOS, Blackberry, and more.

convolvatron• 9 years ago

https://xkcd.com/949/

lsh• 9 years ago

I don't know why you're getting downvoted, sharing files is still in an abysmal state. This wheel will be reinvented again.

jpillora• 9 years ago

See also https://www.sharedrop.io/ (WebRTC-based AirDrop clone)

jbergens• 9 years ago

This kind of tool should probably be distributed as a binary but then it would be a bit harder to know it doesn't do anything strange.

I would probably write it in go to make it easy to compile for different platforms.

sw1sh• 9 years ago

More people should use Keybase, and this would be more easier within its filesystem https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs

y4mi• 9 years ago

Eh,I like the concept of kbfs and have it installed on my PC and phone, but it's not really a competitor to this. Keybase reminds me of a secure alternative to Dropbox or Google drive. You've got a quota that you can upload to their server (encrypted). While you can use it to move files between destinations, that isn't it's primary goal.

And it's not a lossless storage at that, as their filesystem doesn't support all metadata . I.e. it removes any timestamps from the files.

kyberias• 9 years ago

My life is so much happier with Windows. Accessing files on any computer is very easy. Wannacry and that other nasty worm prove it to the world. :)

aluhut• 9 years ago

Didn't catch any malware or viruses since the 90s on my Windows. Copying files with a few mouse clicks is much more comfortable and fast then this...

interfixus• 9 years ago

Strictly for internal networks, and no crypto in transit, but dead easy - also for grandma - and covering phones as well as the three pc platforms: Dukto. I use it all the time.

http://www.msec.it/blog/?page_id=11

bitexploder2• 9 years ago

I just use socat or netcat on home networks. Pipeview for a progress meter. I am as paranoid as they come, but if someone has my small home network they already have my data :)

nattmat• 9 years ago

I see you guys arguing what is easier, wormhole, syncthing, ssh. I'll argue that Keybase is by far the easiest. Just but the files in /Keybase/private/person0,person2

lotharrr15• 9 years ago

I love Keybase.. they're doing great things to bind public keys to names at large identity providers (twitter, github, etc). And in many cases, the github username of your intended recipient is the only thing you know about them anyways.

magic-wormhole can help you in the case where you're sitting next to someone at a conference and they don't have a github/twitter account, or if you want don't want to depend on github/twitter/etc access control (e.g. if some bug in github allowed gists to be published under other people's usernames, that aspect of the keybase security story would fail).

It might also appeal to folks who don't care for centralized identity providers. When we worked on Mozilla Persona, we tried to make it possible for individuals to run their own IdPs and "own your own identity". Keybase can sorta do that (by proving ownership of an HTTP or HTTPS URL), but magic-wormhole is "better" in the sense that it doesn't have any concept of identity at all. The file goes-to/comes-from the person who knew the same code, end of story.

I'm interested in some sort of combination: maybe a confirmation step that uses a wormhole code to exchange the expected public keys with a Keybase peer, to make sure they're the same, without needing to type or read the full RSA key. (There's a protocol named SAS, "Short Authenticated Strings", that can be useful in this case).

reacweb2• 9 years ago

When I want to give things, I use ssh to put it in the static part of my website in a directory with a random name, then I send the url by mail. My sftp client is already configured with ssh keys. When the things I have to send is a collection of jpeg files, I use fgallery.

Piskvorrr3• 9 years ago

"My sftp client is already configured with ssh keys." Well, one of the use cases is "how do you get the SSH pubkeys from here to there?"

reacweb2• 9 years ago

My point is that everybody should have a website somewhere (my C1 at cloudscale is 3.59€ per month). Everybody should have a ftp client configured to access it without hassles.

zimbatm• 9 years ago

I'm surprised https://datproject.org/ didn't come up already.

It also allows you to share any data but also deals with incremental updates. The main use-case is to share big scientific datasets that update over time.

Aissen• 9 years ago

Looks like another application the key exchanges algorithms used in Mozilla Weave/Firefox Sync. They used to do that to associate new devices and send them the keys, but they killed that because the UX was more complex than user/password.

pveierland• 9 years ago

https://transfer.sh/ is another neat service which allows you to upload a file easily using a tool such as curl and get a shareable link. There was one time when I only had Chrome Remote Desktop access to a machine without root, where this was a convenient way to share some files.

  $ curl --upload-file ./hello.txt https://transfer.sh/hello.txt
  https://transfer.sh/66nb8/hello.txt

usernam• 9 years ago

In a similar vein[1], using the python client:

    $ dl-cli some/files
    https://dl.example.com/t=<hash>

additionally, the file is automatically cleared when it goes unused for a while. There is also FEX[2], which is geared more towards power-users and includes bi-directional transfers. Both are fully self-hosted and trivial to set-up.

[1] https://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/dl/ [2] https://fex.rus.uni-stuttgart.de/

Arkanosis• 9 years ago

http://termbin.com/ is very cool too, especially if you have nothing but netcat.

    $ < hello.txt nc termbin.com 9999
    http://termbin.com/e51k

consultSKI• 9 years ago

Make mine pushbullet. Love it. https://www.pushbullet.com/

dreen• 9 years ago

Came here to say this. Pushbullet ftw!

wuliwong• 9 years ago

Isn't this solving a different problem. pushbullet is for sharing data between all your devices. magic-wormhole is for sending files to other people's devices.

akamaozu• 9 years ago

You can have friends and push files to them via pushbullet

JepZ• 9 years ago

Not exactly the same, but for those Linux/KDE users who look for a tool to connect to another machine within the same LAN, I can recommend KDE-Connect (file-transfer, notifications, shared-clipboard, etc.).

dagw3• 9 years ago

This would be so much more useful it was written in a language that made it easy to distribute the whole thing as a single statically compiled binary.

pflanze• 9 years ago

Interesting to see the various approaches. I've been using a pair of simple scripts myself for ages:

https://github.com/pflanze/chj-bin/blob/master/netoffer https://github.com/pflanze/chj-bin/blob/master/netfetch

(they use a few other scripts from the same repo) used like follows (only practical when being able to copy-paste, my use case is to copy things between servers without needing ssh authentication between them, but having open ssh sessions into both from the same desktop/laptop):

    chris@a:/tmp/chris$ echo Hello > World
    chris@a:/tmp/chris$ netoffer World
    --Run:--
    echo jxqtrb7xfq2e4dqy3uitc7986ydj56w59iqu84b | netfetch 78.47.51.206 15123

    chris@b:/tmp/chris$ echo jxqtrb7xfq2e4dqy3uitc7986ydj56w59iqu84b | netfetch 78.47.51.206 15123
    chris@b:/tmp/chris$ cat World 
    Hello

(Uses gpg symmetric encryption underneath.)

Frogolocalypse• 9 years ago

Very simple, handy, and yet powerful utility. Thanks.

mihaifm• 9 years ago

Great collection of tools here. I'm adding here my own approach, aimed at getting around proxies/firewalls: the files are encrypted and sent in the body of a HTTP request. The receiving end is a simple nodejs http server that can be started on the fly.

https://github.com/mihaifm/getransfer

popey• 9 years ago

This is so handy. I pushed it to the snap store. So if you're on a snap supported Linux distro you can just run "snap install wormhole" to get it and future updates.

nathan-osman• 9 years ago

Users may also want to look into NitroShare. Although it only works on the local network, it uses IP broadcast for automatic peer discovery (next version will use mDNS). It includes installers for Windows and macOS. Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora include it in their respective package archives. There is also an Android app. (Disclaimer: I am the maintainer.)

QuamVideri• 9 years ago

Seems likely the use of the "Rendezvous" term is going to get you a cease-and-desist just like Apple got over what is now known as "Bonjour" (aka mDNS)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour_(software)

cosinetau• 9 years ago

RNDZ, and RV are two well understood abbreviations :)

mbonzo2• 9 years ago

Hey everyone! I just did a quick video on Magic Wormhole showing how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SXCLAlpD70

draw_down• 9 years ago

Cool, seems like AirDrop which I find very useful.

aidenn0• 9 years ago

Anybody know how the author generated the word-list? I generated one for my own passphrase use; I took the 2000 most common english words and used metaphone to prune any similar sounding words, which got me down to around 600; I then truncated the list to 512 yielding 9 bits per word.

meejah4• 9 years ago

It is the PGP Word List: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_Words

mbonzo2• 9 years ago

Hey everyone! I just did a quick video on Magic Wormhole showing how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SXCLAlpD70

mmargerum• 9 years ago

Some of the golang folks are working on a very interesting project.

https://github.com/upspin/upspin

niutech• 9 years ago

Why not use one of the online peer-to-peer file transfer services:

https://send-anywhere.com

https://takeafile.com

https://www.justbeamit.com

https://www.sharedrop.io

https://www.reep.io

Magic-Wormhole – Get things from one computer to another, safely

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