Decentralized VPN Written in Go

https://github.com/mehrdadrad/radvpn

by ngaut • 7 years ago

167 43 7 years ago

github.com

davecap1• 7 years ago

Is this similar to ZeroTier https://www.zerotier.com/?

DuskStar2• 7 years ago

Except not as battle hardened and with fewer features, but otherwise that's what it looks like to me

ZeroTier's pretty damn cool, IMO: https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne

0az• 7 years ago

ZeroTier is cool. With it on, I can just grab a file / test something on my laptop without needing to expose it publicly and either setup dyndns or grab my laptop's assigned IP address. I can just keep one bookmark for each service.

As a bonus, it'll route directly, instead of through an Open on server, etc.

I just wish they had an alternative to curl | bash. Something like Docker's install instructions, where you don't have to look through the install script to figure out what's going on inside sudo.

q3k• 7 years ago

Looking at it for a few minutes, this has some issues:

- symmetrical crypto with shared key across all clients, letting any VPN client act as any other client

- no PFS (straight AEAD with AES-GCM)

- alternatively, sketchy home-grown AES-CBC crypto that doesn't seem to be authenticated and as such allows for replay attacks and whatnot

- home-rolled SHA-1 pbkdf1 instead of stdlib pbkdf2 with a better hash

- static routing (ie. no way for a client to decide what prefixes to announce at a given time without updating the centralized config)

- no support for roaming clients like phones or clients behind NAT (currently just depends on being able to send UDP datagrams to a preconfigured remote address)

There's probably other things I missed, especially crypto-wise.

I'd stay away from this (at least for now) and use something like wireguard or tinc instead.

77pt77• 7 years ago

Almost all of those are show stoppers...

pinewurst• 7 years ago

But it’s written in Go and that makes all the difference!

ngcc_hk2• 7 years ago

Yes. That is why it is interesting. Want to democratic this area so no big brother. But then.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 7 years ago

Ironically, Wireguard has an official Go implementation...

fouc• 7 years ago

I suddenly wondered if the Go compiler would ever insert anything that phones home to Google or if any of the networking parts end up providing data to Google in any way.

laurent123456• 7 years ago

Why is Go so special that it needs to be mentioned every time there's a project using it?

"written in go" comes up 540 times in the search results, vs only 196 times for "written in javascript" even though the latter is way more common than Go.

paulddraper2• 7 years ago

symmetrical crypto with shared key across all clients

no support for roaming clients like phones

This isn't that uncommon. I think OpenVPN might not support that either.

or clients behind NAT

shantly• 7 years ago

Most of the decent, semi-mature decentralized VPN or VPN-like meshnet things I can find are GPL or LGPL, so App Store incompatible, meaning no Apple phones (or tablets), at least.

gigatexal• 7 years ago

All valid points. But it’s open to pull requests it being open source and all.

badrabbit3• 7 years ago

- symmetrical crypto with shared key across all clients, letting any VPN client act as any other client

That problem should be solved by signatures or at least a chain of one to one key exchanges. But having a shared key sounds bad.

- no PFS (straight AEAD with AES-GCM)

What does the cipher and AEAD have to do with PFS,I thought that was a key-reuse problem?

- alternatively, sketchy home-grown AES-CBC crypto that doesn't seem to be authenticated and as such allows for replay attacks and whatnot

Yup,home grown sounds kinda bad but I don't see the peoblem if they just replicated the process with their own code without modifying how it works and avoid IV reuse.

- home-rolled SHA-1 pbkdf1 instead of stdlib pbkdf2 with a better hash

Same as before.

- static routing (ie. no way for a client to decide what prefixes to announce at a given time without updating the centralized config)

Sounds like a feature request. PR?

- no support for roaming clients like phones or clients behind NAT (currently just depends on being able to send UDP datagrams to a preconfigured remote address)

Again, a PR would be nice,any project adds features as they grow.

You have good critique but I don't think any of this means the project or quality is utterly bad. Issues and PRs will help them a lot I am sure but your first point about shared keys does bother me a lot.

DuskStar2• 7 years ago

> - alternatively, sketchy home-grown AES-CBC crypto that doesn't seem to be authenticated and as such allows for replay attacks and whatnot
Yup,home grown sounds kinda bad but I don't see the problem if they just replicated the process with their own code without modifying how it works and avoid IV reuse.
> - home-rolled SHA-1 pbkdf1 instead of stdlib pbkdf2 with a better hash
Same as before.

For both of these, my general thought is that they're massive crypto code smells - implementing things yourself when a vetted library exists is just not something you do for secure code. If we can see these crypto issues already, there's going to be more. Maybe it'll be implementation bugs, maybe conceptual architecture issues - but I'd bet on this not being a complete list. So even if these bugs aren't exploitable they're indicative of something deeper.

tptacek2• 7 years ago

They're not saying AEAD has anything to do with PFS. They're saying that the only encryption they have is (at best) the AEAD, without a kex.

The sketchy, home-grown AES-CBC isn't "kind of bad". It's unauthenticated CBC. That's completely broken.

You don't PR a VPN from cryptographically secure to cryptographically sound. The cryptography is most of the point; if it isn't there, it's not going to get there by committee.

MuffinFlavored• 7 years ago

a PR would be nice

I don't like that mindset. Usually an open source contributor/creator shares a project, calls out how awesome it is. A bunch of people prove that it isn't, then the creator's response is "well, help me".

the_duke• 7 years ago

Could you open an issue detailing your concerns to give some visibility to the non-HN user?

I would certainly appreciate it when stumbling over the repo.

tssva• 7 years ago

Wireguard also suffers from having static routing. It could be argued that it is somewhat worse with Wireguard because there is no means for a client to announce networks for routing. I would argue that dynamic routing is a complicated task which goes far beyond just announcing networks and should be handled outside the vpn client. Wirguard's use of allowed ips and NBMA network model complicates doing so.

It could also be argued that Wireguard's support for roaming clients is not much better. Roaming clients really only work properly in a model with a centralized wireguard server with a fixed ip address where the roaming clients connect to the server when they roam so the current ip address for the roaming client is updated.

mcrute• 7 years ago

Aside from the cryptorouting concept and some convenience functions in wg-quick, Wireguard doesn't really have strong opinions on routing. It's perfectly legitimate to setup an interface with a single peer and global (0.0.0.0/0, ::/0) routes then use BGP to announce networks across it and manage the kernel route tables.

ngcc_hk2• 7 years ago

Those free vpn you can get from people who want to target you and get your traffic ? Not as bad I hope.

xvilka• 7 years ago

There is also a Rust[1] implementation.

[1] https://github.com/dswd/vpncloud

sebsito• 7 years ago

Apart from "written in X" is kind of clickbaity I find it useful after all. I think that Go code is clear and readable and so it would be much easier to add missing feature and use if I had such need.

Where "written in Rust" is almost a show stopper for me because I just can't read through the source despite numerous attempts (not saying that Rust is bad of course, it's just subjectively hard to approach for me)

mawalu• 7 years ago

Hijacking this for a project I created a while back. An ansible role that creates a "mesh" VPN between a set of servers using wireguard: https://github.com/mawalu/wireguard-private-networking

OJFord• 7 years ago

With WireGuard in the kernel, and even systemd support, why? What is this even aiming to offer that wg doesn't or couldn't be better done as an abstraction over wg (e.g. if you wanted a Go library for it)?

merb• 7 years ago

actually with a "home grown" vpn (userspace) you control the transport. thus you can even create a transport on h2 which makes it way harder to detect.

tptacek2• 7 years ago

There's userspace WireGuard in Go.

davidcollantes• 7 years ago

Related, recently on HN[0]: https://github.com/jedisct1/dsvpn

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20571739

Decentralized VPN Written in Go

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