rVPN – stealth VPN with end-to-end encryption
rvpn.orgNot sure why you'd vibe-code a new VPN protocol, double ratchet or otherwise, when you can just take WireGuard and make a new transport for it.
WireGuard by itself is not a stealth VPN, but the things that make a VPN "stealthy" are all things you'd layer on top of a WireGuard design, not thread through the middle of it. A datagram-based protocol can run under any obscured transport.
We did this at Fly.io when we discovered that, for one reason or another, 5% of our users simply couldn't reliably use UDP. It was a one-day project to run it under WebSockets instead, and that was before coding agents.
Wireguard is both really useful and pretty frustrating as a user. As a developer it's amazing that you can do things like relay packets through a bouncer with authentication to get around NAT without ever having to think about the protocol level safety, as a user it's near impossible to configure without the confused "why are no packets working", and as you had here it just doesn't make it through a lot of restrictive networking conditions. I'd love some middle ground between wireguard and tailscale in terms of complexity, their clients have way too much stuff in them.
The parent is obviously just Claude making a fancy website and some sort of unreviewed networking protocol that's dressed up to look as if it's a real project. Github really needs to start showing commit cadence and repo birthdates.
> I'd love some middle ground between wireguard and tailscale in terms of complexity, their clients have way too much stuff in them.
netbird's a thing to check out if you want an alternative to tailscale you can self-host.
Netbird also, at least to me, has much too much stuff in it, perhaps even more. I would love to be able to connect to everything reliably no matter the network, the daemon doesn't need a reverse proxy, Ai agent routing and billing, in browser SSH client, it's all just attack surface. Tailscale allows you to compile a lot of it out as of a couple of weeks ago, but it's still an awful lot of code.
Netbird doesn’t have proper network isolation, due to its shared policy space compared to one gateway interface per customer/organization. Which is not an issue if you are the only user, but if you are building a service for customers to use, and there’s a potential scale up, it will be an issue, either having multi account mode which will results in many resources you need to deploy or containers per customer, or, having them all shared policy that could potentially allow customer to customer access if misconfiguration happens, alternatively, building a gateway in the middle to broker it all but traffic must pass through which is operational cost plus extra latency, and even privacy concerns.
Maybe check out Nebula? (I'm involved in the project.)
Which is why I am building my stuff around iroh instead.
I think there is value in undisciplined projects like this one because we may find protocols that beat incumbents by pure chance.
If you wrap wireguard or build a layer on top of it, it's no longer wireguard that first listens to packets on public interface, it's your wrapper. The security properties of wireguard don't hold (potential for RCE before packets reach wireguard). That's a problem with projects like wstunnel or udp2raw.
You want wireguard to be the software that takes the packets first.
>The security properties of wireguard don't hold
That's plain wrong. The first thing a normal wireguard faces is... the wild network of the Internet, with many servers and hordes of malicious agents. This is what makes is an "encrypted VPN", it's expected to withstand being transmitted by garbage media.
>potential for RCE before packets reach wireguard
There is no such thing as "rce packets". Moreover, every wireguard implementation has a different surface for RCEs (bugs), it's not a property of wireguard, it's a property of the implementation, of which there are at least three.
You didn't get it. It would be more clear if you implement it.
With these wrappers, peers also install and run wrapper and unwrapper services, to encapsulate udp packets into websocket frames and vice versa. For example, the software that proceses incoming packets from the internet could be wstunnel listening on 443/TCP. This layer converts the websocket TCP traffic to wireguard UDP, which wireguard would then decrypt. Wireguard could even listen to local host.
In popular implementations, this layer could have notable attack surface, particularly because it often provides additional features, such as obfuscation behind https, authentication, TLS client certificate validation, etc. I recall Debian has a minimal package which does only UDP to tcp parsing and conversion, which is written in C and not maintained. That layer could be insecure, and may lead to code execution on server before wireguard is even involved.
No, the parent commenter's logic is sounder than yours. WireGuard in its natural configuration can't trust incoming packets at all, so there's nothing to subtract by layering things on top of it.
Obviously, all software creates an opportunity for a bug, so even though this is pretty low-risk as attack surface goes, if you're making a choice between plain natural WireGuard and WireGuard wrapped in WebSockets, the "plain" version has marginally less attack surface.
But if your choice is between WireGuard wrapped in WebSockets or an entire new VPN protocol, clearly the new protocol drastically increases the attack surface.
In any case: wrapping WireGuard with something else does nothing at a design level to put WireGuard's security at risk. That's not how it works.
In your implementation, you wrote software that listens to public internet, takes as input websocket traffic and outputs UDP. Right there, there is potential for vulnerabilities and code execution. This piece has nothing to do with software that would next process UDP.
That's why wireguard over TCP is not as secure as wireguard UDP.
This makes no sense. It's marginally less safe to accept UDP packets than TCP packets, for which you at least need to complete a 3WH to deliver frames. I don't think you've thought this through.
IIUC the parent's point is that if you first have to unwrap incoming, say, HTTPS traffic to obtain the Wireguard UDP packets, that unwrapping code might contain vulnerabilities, so an attack compromising the machine Wireguard is running on might occur before the packets ever reach the Wireguard implementation. From where I stand that's a somewhat academic scenario, though. (Unwrapping correctly & safely is usually not that difficult. Just don't use a memory-unsafe language for parsing & unpacking maybe.)
I address that at length 2 comments back.
No you did not.
Wrapping-Unwrapping code is irrelevant to the security of wireguard. Even if your wrapper-unwrapper is an outright remote shell without authorization, it would do nothing to compromise wireguard itself, as long as that shell has no sudo.
But in any case, that wrapper-unwrapper is usually just a packet rewriter, port-to-port, runs as a disabled user with no login privileges, no shell, and in a chroot. The only thing your RCE can do is to exit(1) the rewriter itself.
> There is no such thing as "rce packets".
I mean, that depends quite a bit on the code reading the packets, no?
My interpretation of OP is that they trust Wireguard’s code to be secure - random wrappers, somewhat less so.
>My interpretation of OP is that they trust Wireguard’s code to be secure - random wrappers, somewhat less so.
There is not such thing as "wireguard code". Wireguard is a protocol, and "the security of wireguard" is the inability of the attackers to read the contents of the stream. This is not affected by the wrapper, because a wrapper is no more hazardous than the high seas, i.e. the Internet.
Speaking of implementation code. There are three wireguard implementations that I am aware of: Go, Linux, and OpenBSD. I am quite sure that none of those are bug-free, but adding a wrapper around wireguard packets has NO effect on the security of the implementation. The implementation is receiving packets from "something". This something can be either the net, or the wrapper, or even /dev/urandom
This isn't true. You don't lose the security properties of WireGuard just because you wrap it in some other transport. There is no particular virtue to it "taking the packets first".
> You want wireguard to be the software that takes the packets first.
Congratulations, DPI marked your connection as... WireGuard and blocked it.
I'd say you are now double safe - there is could be no RCE if there is no packets at all.
WireGuard by itself is bare. Currently it don't have a "proper" ("official") way to make custom transport for it. Thus if you have to do it, the task is no different than writing a UDP proxy.
But that UDP proxy is then an independent program, with no awareness on the states of the WireGuard instance, thus the proxy have to run in a very dumb/blind way. That's not ideal.
If you want to write a network proxy, it's the best for the proxy to know as much user intent as possible, so for example it knows which request should be retried, which should be given up as fast as possible if encountered a fault, and which request should just be rerouted to another server, etc.
Why is it best for the proxy to "know as much user intent as possible"? You can get that with WireGuard either way, but it's not at all clear to me that's true. We ran a rather huge deployment of WebSockets-encapsulated WireGuard, and I believe Tailscale has as well, and the fact that WireGuard was oblivious to it caused no problems I'm aware of.
> Not sure why you'd vibe-code a new VPN protocol, double ratchet or otherwise, when you can just take WireGuard and make a new transport for it.
Why TFA explains it, it's also in the title: "stealth". WireGuard is trivial to detect and block, and has no aspirations at being stealth.
He literally acknowledged that:
> WireGuard by itself is not a stealth VPN, but the things that make a VPN "stealthy" are all things you'd layer on top of a WireGuard design, not thread through the middle of it. A datagram-based protocol can run under any obscured transport.
Please read the full comment before replying.
> Memory-safe in Rust > The core is written in Rust, so entire classes of vulnerability cannot occur.
Hmm... It just ain't true.
---
For those who need a "stealth VPN", use <https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core/> or its GUI version <https://github.com/2dust/v2rayN/>
There's this naive view of security where you can just 'add' security to something like you are applying some medicine. You add rust to software to increase security, you install antiviruses to computers to make them more secure..
Proxyguard already fills this niche using Wireguard over HTTPS and is not a vibe-coded project. https://codeberg.org/eduVPN/proxyguard
I discovered recently Three UK is slowing down port 443, and if I started using 2000-3000 port range it increased my speeds 10x
> The mobile apps are paid. Development is fully funded by PDG Global Limited; revenue from app sales, together with donations, contributes towards development costs. The core remains open source under AGPLv3.
I cant find anything on this company, but I got to say im sussed out by any VPN who's three language options are English, Russian and Chinese. It screams spook activity.
>im sussed out by any VPN who's three language options are English, Russian and Chinese. It screams spook activity.
Not at all. China, Russia, and Iran are the three biggest markets for VPNs.
In China about 150 million people use a VPN, in Russia about 60 million, about half the population
Throw in Iran/Farsi and you've probably covered >80% of the stealth VPN market/users. Normal protocols get blocked in those countries, so.
On the contrary! The main market for this type of VPN is China, Russia, and Iran.
Sure, but why do you think they're marketed these services, who would it be valuable too...
Most VPN companies are incredibly sus, outside of Mulvad they're mostly all incredibly suspicious imo. Western intelligence is desperate to enable the use of such tools in enemy territory so they can bombard enemy culture with American culture and make the populations eager to adopt American/Western customs and as a byproduct install leaders who are pro western ideology and less likely to be adversarial. VPNs when marketed to these countries should be seen as tools of propaganda dissemination l, in my opinion.
The EFF will talk a big game about how this tech is about freedom of information, human rights and democracy.but really they're founded by a bunch of US Naval Research guys who are basically tasked with building the "cyber" infrastructure to ideologically invade adversial countries so they can be psychologically colonized. They then launder that mission with discussions about free speech and democracy.
The original US Army's Psychological Operations Unit, was called the "Ghost Army" they used a patch with a ghost hovering over an implied target shooting electricity from its hands.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Ghostarm...
The ghost on the patch is symbolic for beaming in signals into enemy territory to brainwash, intimidate and control an enemy population.
The reason that China, Russia and Iran have nation state firewalls is because the US is so good at this, and the US wants to control any country who has any potential of competing with it. Its not because they hate freedom or something, its because anyone the US has deemed an economic or ideological opponent will be targeted in this way. We will beam signals through whatever means/protocol into a country to gain a psychological foothold in their culture, we will then convince them to kill their leaders and install US puppets.
I routinely say that Starlink should make its logo the Ghost Army patch, because thats what it was built for. While it functions as a cool business, and does provide value, it was created as the ultimate propaganda dissemination tool
(eventually atleast, it will be very hard to mitigate against if they can pull off some sort of cellular implementation of Starlink, which they're actively working towards).
TOR and VPN companies attempted to serve this purpose, when this paradigm failed to be a general purpose tool for bypassing nation state firewalls they had to find another way so they helped Elon bootstrap a literal satallite constellation for this purpose. Its literally the Ghost in the sky waving its hand over a population with few ways to prevent its use.
The VPN industry in China, Russia and Iran are weapons for this agenda.
> The original US Army's Psychological Operations Unit, was called the "Ghost Army" they used a patch with a ghost hovering over an implied target shooting electricity from its hands.
> The ghost on the patch is symbolic for beaming in signals into enemy territory to brainwash, intimidate and control an enemy population.
Any source that support your claims?
From wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Army):
> The Ghost Army was a United States Army tactical deception unit during World War II officially known as the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. The 1,100-man unit was created to deceive the Axis forces and mislead them as to the size and location of Allied forces, while giving the actual units elsewhere time to maneuver.
> ... During their tenure, the Ghost Army carried out more than 20 deception campaigns, putting on a "traveling road show" using inflatable tanks, sound trucks, fake radio transmissions, scripts and pretense.
Also the description on the patch:
> Ghost Army insignia, not used by the actual unit, but associated with the unit after the war
>It screams spook activity.
Like, it's a FBI honeypot or it's a CIA op to help dissidents?
Why not Xray-core VLESS families? It sounds like your code is written by an LLM that is trained on Xray-core source code.
It’s not enough to put everything in https if you really want to circumvent modern censorship technology.
This. Modern censorship technology (and not US ISP censorship, but state-level censorship like China and Iran use) are very adept at looking at traffic patterns and within a few seconds, determining that traffic on HTTPS ports is not actually HTTPS traffic. HTTPS traffic has certain behaviors that are not replicated by VPN flows.
>stealth VPN with end-to-end encryption
Not sure what this means. AFAIK all VPNs have end-to-end encryption. Stealth ? will need to read to see what that means.
I read that as destination hosts being unable to distinguish a VPN user from a regular user.
The typical use case for this is usually malicious btw, and the means to do this are residential proxies, which again are usually maliciously obtained
a vpn that bypasses deep-packet-inspection firewalls by simulating common HTTPS traffic
> We believe privacy should be proven, not promised
Then instantly gives you a shell script that it pipes to `sudo bash`. The irony isn't lost here.
That's also the cost of providing convenience AND something that can open port 443
Convenient for the author, sure. Most operating systems have a way of installing packages as the administrative user without piping random scripts from the internet into sudo bash, I suspect most users already know and may even like their operating system's method for installing software.
Also the suggested installation method of at least: rust, bun, uv, deno, and homebrew
Such a tired trope. If you want to do it the hard way, you are welcome to build by hand https://github.com/PDG-Global/rVPN-core#building
Just because everyone else is doing it doesn't mean it's right.
>Such a tired trope.
Criticism doesn't expire or saturate, if something is wrong, and people continue to do it, it's still wrong thereafter
It is possible to write a TLS-on-443 VPN that is hard to distinguish from HTTPS.
However, if someone claims (or as good as) that "encrypted over TLS on 443" intrinsically pos5esses this property, they demonstrate that they
• do not understand the state-of-the-art in L7 firewalls as of 2010, let alone today
• don't understand common enterprise and state-level controls like HTTPS decrypt (which instantly break this)
• haven't read any of the last decade of papers on detecting protocols like obfsproxy
• haven't even bothered to look at existing takes on this (like tor) and the compromises that they make
---
From the whitepaper:
> Desktop, CLI, and Android clients use BoringSSL to mimic a Chrome TLS 1.3 ClientHello fingerprint, helping evade deep-packet inspection.
Do you set an SNI / eSNI? No? Trivially detectable. I believe Palo Alto AppID would flag this instantly as non-HTTPS masqueraded traffic.
Go fire this up behind China's golden shield, and see how many minutes your tunnel stays performant before they tarpit you; then come write a whitepaper.
You understand this area better than I do, so enlighten me if you will. I think this race will end with detectors running models vs evaders running models, then evaders lose because detectors have more compute.
Unless evaders share information with eachother in realtime - probably something like Yggdrasil network, and then everyone needs to let some of their unimportant traffic go unwrapped so that each node can run a local continually finetuned model to maintain a living spec which describes how to mimic the clear traffic on that node, then trade those specs with eachother.
Appears to be a websocket tunnel delivered after regular HTTPS. So, probably an SNI. In general, its wstunnel.
It is somewhat irrelevant. There were papers 12 years ago on detecting things like obfsproxy (and its ilk) by traffic pattern analysis. It is extremely difficult to make a traffic tunnel look like standard web traffic and not like a tunnel.
And because the idea is rather obvious-- one of OpenVPN's original raison d'etres, decades ago, was evading detection-- L7 firewalls for corporate and state customers have been rather keen to shore up their detections for all manner of meek, snowflake, obfsproxy, and obscure VPNs.
My understanding as of a decade ago was that China's golden shield, on seeing mysterious multiminute encrypted "HTTPS" sessions, tarpit it and attempt scans / DOS attacks on the other end. How's your rVPN going to hold up when baidu LOICs your endpoint?
> curl https://[...] | sudo bash
> [...] verifies checksum [...]
Phew, good thing it verifies that, otherwise piping unverified output to a sudo shell could be dangerous!
There's only 4 mentions of Rust on the landing page. Are we sure this is memory safe enough?
To be extra sure I saved a copy on a spinning platter of iron oxide.
When I see stuff like this at first I think oh something I can use, and then the next thought is, wait is this to make it easier for bots to hammer the web undetected?
Yes I think its really just the latter.
Do you have a Docker image available? I want to run this on my Coolify server. I have a V2Ray for my family in Iran setup currently and I am wondering how this hold up.
I am all for exciting new VPN technologies but even the home page is vibecoded.
> Many flows. One connection shape
Shape, shape... shape.
I feel up until AI, nobody with their right mind would refer to the shape of a connection.
That's how you know there's nothing exciting here. Just some ordinary technology rehyped by AI phrasing.
Yeah. Sounds like just wstunnel would be equivalent in many ways.
i was needing this very thing while trying to do work from the infusion clinic with a very aggressive outbound firewall.
Does anyone have a guide on getting wireguard + stunnel set up to evade DPS firewalls?