security-research VS Nebula

> Alright, let's take a step back. First, I am not a mobile developer.

I think you're whichever kind of developer your current position requires. You've been talking about Android non-stop throughout this conversation, and conversations you've had with others on this website [1]. When you were lambasting me about my perceived knowledge of mobile development you were touting your Android knowledge. Now that I've proven Android is actually one of the primary tools Google uses to promote Chrome (and you admitted you don't know much about iOS) you want to distance yourself from mobile development altogether.

> Other examples include whatever iOS does (which I don't know), containers (docker and the likes), VMs, and everything in-between (like what snap or flatpak use).

We're not discussing theoretical means with which you could sandbox an application, we're talking about how apps are actually used in reality. If you need to fire up a virtual machine every time you use your favorite desktop apps, then you're only proving my point that they're not inherently very secure. Not to mention, the average user probably has no idea what Docker or a virtual machine even is. Like I said in my original response, lots of things are possible in theory, but in practice web browsers are much better at sandboxing apps than desktop operating systems (and even better than mobile operating systems).

> If anything, modern browsers are so complex (and getting worse with time) that the attack surface is big

Ironically, a lot of that complexity arises from the web's insistence on security. V8 is complex because it has so many safeguards in place to sandbox JavaScript, and that sandboxing is taken very seriously. There's a reward anywhere from 10,000 to 150,000 USD if you can escape the sandbox [2][3]. Browsers are inherently more secure than desktop apps because they limit access to the underlying platform. Someone developing malware as a web app has to first escape the browser sandbox, just to gain the privileges that a desktop app has natively. If it helps, you can think of every desktop app as a webapp which has already escaped the browser.

> Moreover, Web UIs bring their own class of issues that don't really apply to native apps.

No, web developers have just spent so much time thinking about security, that native app developers haven't even realized these security issues are relevant yet. It took years for Apple and Google to come to the brilliant conclusion that they should notify users when an app is reading from the clipboard, something which at the time was considered just a Browser "class of issue". Maybe in 2034 they'll figure this out for desktop apps.

> But CORS is really a browser thing, I don't think it really makes sense to compare it to anything outside the "webview world".

It makes sense to compare it to things outside of the browser because it protects users and servers. You seem to want to disqualify any point I make that you can't disprove. If you don't think web technology is comparable to anything outside the browser, then what are we even arguing about? This whole discussion has been about comparing the security of web apps to non-web apps.

> If security is your concern (and you seem to insist that it is), then webapps are really not better than the alternatives. Actually, the Apple Store and the Play Store (to give an example in the mobile world) allow Apple and Google to somehow monitor the apps that users install, which is most certainly more secure than a model where anyone can load any webapp from any website.

Apple and Google have to monitor which apps make it to their app stores, BECAUSE apps are so much more prone to security problems. You once again have it completely backwards. No one has to gatekeep websites because browsers are so much better at sandboxing applications. And allow me to remind you that admitted you have no idea how iOS sandboxing works, so you can't really be confident about this stance even if it did make sense.

And now you're arguing in favor of the app store duopoly which contradicts your point about software diversity. You can't have it both ways. You're trying to hold on to two contradictory points at the same time: you don't like the supposed lack of Browser diversity (which is why you seem to detest Chromium), but you like the supposed security guarantees of the mobile app store duopoly, which is even less diverse.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38919389

[2] https://github.com/google/security-research/blob/master/v8ct...

[3] https://bughunters.google.com/about/rules/5745167867576320/c...

This research is also available in text form.

But both Nebula and tinc max out at around 1 Gbit/s on my Hetzner servers, thus not using most of my 10 Gbit/s connectivity. This is because they cap out at 100% of 1 CPU. The Nebula issue about that was closed due to "inactivity" [2].

I also observed that when Nebula operates at 100% CPU usage, you get lots of package loss. This causes software that expects reasonable timings on ~0.2ms links to fail (e.g. consensus software like Consul, or Ceph). This in turn led to flakiness / intermittent outages.

I had to resolve to move the big data pushing softwares like Ceph outside of the VPN to get 10 Gbit/s speed for those, and to avoid downtimes due to the packet loss.

Such software like Ceph has its own encryption, but I don't trust it, and that mistrust was recently proven right again [3].

So I'm currently looking to move the Ceph into WireGuard.

Summary: For small-data use, tinc and Nebula are fine, but if you start to push real data, they break.

[1]: https://github.com/gsliepen/tinc/issues/218

[2]: https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/issues/637

[3]: https://github.com/google/security-research/security/advisor...

You can run the PoC if you want: https://github.com/google/security-research/tree/master/pocs...

* Visual Studio Code had a Remote Code Execution vulnerability triggered by a simple link https://github.com/google/security-research/security/advisor...

Nebula - Peer-to-peer overlay network. Developed and used internally by Slack. Similar to Tailscale but completely open source. Doesn't use WireGuard. Written in Go.

(I am a Nebula maintainer.) We recently merged support for gVisor-based services, although it's very new, and I don't know of much experimentation that's been done with it yet: https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/pull/965

Nebula, originally from Slack[0].

Wireguard rightly gets a lot of attention, but Nebula is a really simple and easy to deploy mesh network that is often overlooked.

It does lack a management GUI and that stuff is very much DIY.

[0] https://github.com/slackhq/nebula

Fair enough about the android mobile client... My use case only involves meshing linux appliances across various networks so we only need the nebula core binaries which are under MIT license

https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/blob/master/LICENSE

That's not at all confusing with Slack's Nebula. https://github.com/slackhq/nebula

Sounds like a bunch of your pain points are just related to needing an online CA or ICA. But, looking through the Nebula docs I don't know that it supports things like CRL addresses where you could host the CRL, or OCSP responders. Someone got support for an OCSP responder but never submitted a PR with completed code: https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/issues/72

Nebula is a scalable, cross-platform overlay networking tool focused on performance, simplicity, and security. This portable tool is equally adapted for linking a small number of computers or scaling to connect tens of thousands. It integrates encryption, security groups, certificates, and tunneling into a powerful, cohesive connectivity solution. Thanks for the recommendation go to jmeador42.

Replying to my own comment as I can no longer edit it:

The folks over at Slack had an interesting discussion regarding the the "battle of the VPNs" article published by Netmaker I sourced in my parent comment:

https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/discussions/911

Interesting. I thought recognized the logo, apparently seems to be a commercial support offering of https://github.com/slackhq/nebula and they support the "nebula" iOS app. I had been using for nebula/defined in the past.

Nebula: Is super easy to get running. It uses an interesting angle, working on the service and not just the device level. Unfortunately their NAT support seems to be still quite problematic and I am not going to maintain all those forwarded ports manually. There is a PR to support PCP but even if that ever gets applied I am not sure how well that will play with older routers. While it should be battle proven at slack, the community seems to be not that active. It still has the in-house tool that just got released.