Vita: simple and fast VPN gateway

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willangley• 7 years ago

IPsec is pretty much universal in networking hardware and cloud provider networks nowadays. There's a better chance it'll work for you if you can't or don't want to control both ends of the connection.

Hardware:

* Cisco: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/net_mgmt/vpn_solutions...

* Juniper: https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/junos/topics/top...

Cloud:

* AWS: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/vpn-connect...

* Azure: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/vpn-gateway/vpn-gatew...

* gcloud: https://cloud.google.com/vpn/docs/concepts/overview

Also, some software environments have better support for IPsec than Wireguard; a glance at the Algo docs (https://github.com/trailofbits/algo) suggests that Windows and OpenWRT are both in this category today.

FWIW, I work for Google, I haven't configured IPsec in forever, and I'll probably reach for Algo first the next time I think I need IPsec; I don't think I have enough endpoints in my home network to need hardware offloading :)

tptacek• 7 years ago

Right, but this is a solution in which you're meant to control both ends (IPSEC runs from Vita to Vita). That's an ideal environment for WireGuard.

dcbadacd2• 7 years ago

Last time I configured IPSec it was so horrible, really-really-really horrible, I will never touch it again with a ten-foot-pole. Starting from the fact that the software was hard to configure, so was it hard to find working (new) configuration examples as well as secure configurations. It never felt right after setting it up and I did not want to spend any more time on it, wireguard has been a blessing in that aspect.

huhtenberg• 7 years ago

Since it's ESP-based, what are the improvements here over a conventional IPsec VPN?

It would also help to know how different it is from OpenVPN, for example, and other VPN options including WireGuard.

I mean it's nice to see another VPN, but it'd be useful to know right off the bat how it compares to existing options.

djsumdog• 7 years ago

I was curious about that too. I know there were some WireGuard/OpenVPN benchmarks a while back. It'd be interesting to see these technologies compared for speed.

gonzo2• 7 years ago

The published wireguard results are questionable, as the reported results 1011Mbps on a documented -Gbps NIC is impossible even before considering the protocol/framing overhead, which is within 2 bytes of IPSec ESP using AES-GCM-128 with the standard nonce.

OpenVPN is slow.

wmf• 7 years ago

This is polling-based, so it's probably faster. But if you really need the performance I would lean towards VPP since it seems to be more tested.

gonzo2• 7 years ago

From the readme:

“~2.5 Mpps (or ~5 Gbps of IMIX traffic) per core on a modern CPU”

Note CPU unspecified in above.

A Xeon-D 1541 (2.1GHz) will do 2.44 Mpps, (Simple IMIX) and a i7-6950X will do 3.27 Mpps running AES-GCM-128 and VPP.

A kernel-based Linux implementation will do a bit under 500 Kpps running the same algorithm.

The keying algorithm seems interesting, and is vaguely Wireguard-like (would be more if it used a public-private keypair).

rkeene23• 7 years ago

I have used tinc [0] for this scenario successfully for 15 years. It not only supports full mesh but automatic full mesh. It will use UDP for the data stream when possible, supports RSA and Ed25519, and supports transporting either IP or Ethernet frames.

I used the mode where it supports Ethernet frames to merge the VLANs of two datacenters across the WAN (with some additional ebtables to prevent some kinds of frames) to add the ability to migrate systems from one datacenter to another during a partial outage.

yjftsjthsd-h• 7 years ago

Is tinc okay security-wise? IIRC last time I looked the older crypto was really iffy looking, and the newer crypto (ED25519 rocks) was only in the dev/unstable version.

rkeene23• 7 years ago

There were some issues in 1.0 that are fixed in 1.1, for which the protocol is not yet finalized although the beta releases are stable. The lack of a final release is annoying, since it does not guarantee upgrades will work with older clients but this is because the protocol isn't finalized.

They are documented towards the bottom of http://tinc-vpn.org/security/

cbluth• 7 years ago

bummer its single threaded...

mycall4• 7 years ago

I see some people experimenting and achieving more Mbit/s with their separate async thread host

https://github.com/gsliepen/tinc/issues/110

Jnr• 7 years ago

Wireguard just makes more sense to me.

TrueDuality2• 7 years ago

For now tinc makes more sense to me. I plan on fully switching everything to WireGuard once it actually enters the mainline kernel.

groestl• 7 years ago

Tinc could still make sense as a control plane for the WireGuard VPN though. There have been talks about WireGuard as a backend for tinc [0], hope that sees some progress.

[0] http://www.tinc-vpn.org/pipermail/tinc/2017-February/004755....

vorpalhex• 7 years ago

Each route uses a pre-shared super key that is installed on both ends of the route.

Woof, not asymmetric? Is that normal for IPSec? I realize it's never sent over wire, but still makes me nervous.

TrueDuality2• 7 years ago

Static symmetric keys is one of the ways to authenticate an IPSec tunnel. It does also support certificates for authentication or fully unauthenticated connections (but still encrypted).

jonathanoliver• 7 years ago

ZeroTier has been filling this gap for us for a few years now.

morpheuskafka• 7 years ago

Yeah, ZeroTier is awesome! Works great on every platform, simple authentication scheme, and it's always connected. I use it for access to remote servers (have the zt subnet set to bypass firewall for accessing various debug servers) for a nonprofit project and for all kinds of personal uses as well. The free hosted version has up to 100 devices on a network and you can self host as well.

jbverschoor• 7 years ago

Indeed.. somehow it's not getting any love

oneguynick• 7 years ago

Fantastic product that still surprises me with its ease of use.

fiatjaf5• 7 years ago

So, can I easily host the server?

ZeroTier is great, but hosting the server is very complicated (I'm not going to stop using it now, since it's so easy and is already set, but it's good to know of alternatives).

detaro• 7 years ago

It's based on Snabb, a user-space networking platform, so it'll need direct hardware access and supports only a few specific NICs. But in exchange for that, it should be really fast.

fiatjaf5• 7 years ago

Is it possible to use cjdns for that kind of thing? I'm genuinely asking as I don't understand it.

Once I tried to set up a VPN using some odd Windows software (OpenVPN, maybe?) and the results were disastrous. I didn't understand any of the jargon the program used, and I think I didn't get what was its main use case (most certainly it wasn't what I was trying to do, that was creating a local subnet between two computers or two LANs).

Then some months later I tried ZeroTier and was able to understand everything, it seemed a perfect fit.

But still, people call ZeroTier a VPN. So why is it so different? And why does it use a jargon so different?

ficklepickle• 7 years ago

I think zeroTier is meant to be easy whereas openVPN is versatile and can be configured in many ways.

One use case of a VPN is to connect two local networks together. Another is to have your traffic appear to be coming from a different geographical area.

In some cases you wouldn't want the local networks to be able to speak, like commercial VPN services, for security reasons.

fiatjaf5• 7 years ago

Shouldn't these two cases/features have different names? They're completely different. Calling both "VPN" is wrong.

drewp2• 7 years ago

I ran cjdns for 5 years but recently switched off it. For one, it seemed to have too much traffic over my limited outbound link when things should have been more idle. Also, the commit logs were a little unnerving to me for code I'm trusting with my network security:

All kinds of "oops" edits: https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/commit/3abe50b8e744f72696... https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/commit/feabb1970fbaecf65c... https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/commit/c51d89431f1fa42955... https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/commit/1b0c999bd2e5988c3f... https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/commit/355d7d77cc82c52bf1... (function args passed in the wrong order)

Some are about extra traffic: https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/commit/8bcfbf227a87020931... https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/commit/0ee9cb7f45b466232b...

Also it's ipv6 only, which took some fussing. Performance was fine, even on rpi. Reestablishing links was slow and sometimes required restarting of the daemon. Daemons would occasionally get wedged. Log output is unconventional and uses a special reader tool (a la adb for android). Occasionally routes wouldn't be chosen right (two home computers would route via an external cloud box), which I'd fix by restarting the right daemons.

I laboriously switched to openvpn (two networks) and haven't worked out all the routing and hotswitching for my roaming phone+laptop yet. Now I'm considering vita, tinc, zerotier, or wireguard. Probably I'll try out zerotier to see if it works out of the box, then try wireguard if I'm going to have to configure it a lot, since it seems like WG is the most unix-toolbox-do-one-thing out of all of them.

neilalexander• 7 years ago

Check out Yggdrasil - https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ - we've tried very hard to solve the problems that cjdns has, seem to be much more reliable in real world conditions and we send/receive much less idle traffic to do it. We also have Wireguard-like crypto-key routing for both IPv4 and IPv6. (I am one of the developers.)

fiatjaf5• 7 years ago

Thank you very much.

Actually, I don't know what are people trying to achieve when they run these things.

Did you had a problem cjdns was solving?

mycall4• 7 years ago

Reminds me of tinc, which is under appreciated.

otterwww• 7 years ago

Their key exchange implementation looks scary and like a last minute scramble to not be shit. No confidence here

Yuval_Halevi• 7 years ago

been using wiregurd. How's Vita different from it?

Vita: simple and fast VPN gateway

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