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Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

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Re: Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

#241

Post by rakoo »

ddtaylor wrote: post #234
rakoo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Connectivity" here needs to be taken at large: syncthing needs to have a folder already shared between two machines. There's some setup involved that is not automatic. The entire setup phase of magic wormhole is "copy those 3 words" and boom you're done.

I think a lot of people talking about Synchthing must have used it in a different way in the past. It has a QR code now that encodes that 16-digit number or whatever that is used for the same purposes of key exchange and initial handshaking. I use it with my wifes phone to transfer files between her drawing tablet and her Linux system she uses for Blender every day.

Yes, but even that is more involvement: you need to create a new specific folder, add a device, share that folder, accept on the receiver, copy the file in the folder, and wait for full sync in the web ui. It's a much longer setup that makes sense if you will synchronize files/folders with the same machine in the same folder, but that's not always the case. magic-wormhole removes all that back-and-forth dance for one-off sends.

Re: Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

#242

Post by bscphil »

croemer wrote: post #211
ghusbands wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A factor of six is a very long way off, pretty much universally.

Not as far off as the casual reader might think 20MB vs 1Gb sounds way more than the actuall 160Mb vs 1Gb - one shouldn't use Bytes and bits in a direct comparison together. One or the other, otherwise it's misleading/confusing.

In this case transferring the data at the slow rate would have taken more than a week, so it's no small difference. Actually one side had a 10 Gbps line, so if the other side had had faster networking I could easily have exceeded the limit and gotten the transfer done more than 6x faster.

I used the term "1 Gbps line" just because it's a well known quantity - the limitation of Gigabit Ethernet. The point wasn't that multiplexing TCP can get you 6x better speeds, it's that it improved the speed so much that the TCP bandwidth-delay product was no longer the limiting factor in the transfer.

Re: Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

#244

Post by mistell »

jwilk wrote: post #195
panarky wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use wormhole a lot, but I've been too lazy to figure out if it's as secure as ssh/scp, so I always gpg the file I'm transferring before putting it into wormhole. Is that paranoid behavior?

> too lazy to figure out if it's as secure as ssh/scp It absolutely isn't. See my rant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24519895

[flagged]

Re: Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

#245

Post by mistell »

InfiniteRand wrote: post #106
lotharrr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

scp/rsync are great tools, but they require pre-coordination of keys. One side is the client, the other is the server. The client needs an account on the server machine (so the human on the client machine must provide an ssh pubkey to the human on the server machine, who must be root, and create a new account with `adduser`, and populate the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file). And the client needs to know the server's corr…

But if you already have ssh set up for the target machine, is there any advantage such as speed or recoverability vs scp?

The whole point is wormhole fills in a gap where scp isn’t viable or convenient.

Re: Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

#246

Post by toastercat »

Tomte wrote: post #24
toastercat wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Möbius Sync doesn't sync in the background; you must have the app in the foreground for it to function. So, not quite a proper substitute for Syncthing, but may work for OPs usecase.

Of course it syncs in the background. It‘s just not instantaneous, because iOS severely limits what you can do in the background.

Weird -- at least when I tried it, I couldn't get it to work in the background. Maybe it was working, but not reliably?

Re: Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

#247

Post by fragmede »

yownie wrote: post #243

Do I understand correctly from this thread that there's still no good one reliable way to send files across networks where both participants are NAT'd ? What about using Onionshare to solve NAT'ing or at least Topr for handshaking?

Reliability is fine, performance is, depending on your demands, not. F the coordination server is not up to task of matching throughput of the two servers, and a lot of bytes need to be transferred, then it's noticable. But the tech at large works, depending on the implementation you choose to use. (I'm partial to Tailscale, although that's a different service, it lets me transfer files between computers (with additional SW) without manually mapping a port. They are using DERP for the coordination server.

Re: Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

#248

Post by yownie »

fragmede wrote: post #247
yownie wrote: post #243

Do I understand correctly from this thread that there's still no good one reliable way to send files across networks where both participants are NAT'd ? What about using Onionshare to solve NAT'ing or at least Topr for handshaking?

Reliability is fine, performance is, depending on your demands, not. F the coordination server is not up to task of matching throughput of the two servers, and a lot of bytes need to be transferred, then it's noticable. But the tech at large works, depending on the implementation you choose to use. (I'm partial to Tailscale, although that's a different service, it lets me transfer files between computers (with additi…

I'm sorry but was your reply meant for me?

and if so was the reliable way DERP as you mentioned?

Re: Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

#249

Post by lotharrr »

yownie wrote: post #243

Do I understand correctly from this thread that there's still no good one reliable way to send files across networks where both participants are NAT'd ? What about using Onionshare to solve NAT'ing or at least Topr for handshaking?

WebRTC (and the various hole-punching techniques listed elsewhere here) have mechanisms to help with most cases of both participants living behind NAT boxes. The remaining cases require some sort of relay that is willing to proxy the connection through the extra-strict NAT layers.

Tor is basically a distributed set of proxy servers, so using onion servers (aka Hidden Services) is a viable, albeit somewhat slow, way to manage even the strict NAT boxes.

If you have Tor installed, then `wormhole send --tor` will automatically use an onion service to do exactly that.

Re: Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

#250

Post by notTooFarGone »

menzoic wrote: post #179

Autocompleting secrets sounds unsafe. > The receiving side offers tab-completion on the codewords, so usually only a few characters must be typed.

Also isn't it susceptible for DOS attacks? Can't I just spawn 100.000 clients and receive on pretty much all secrets, all the time?
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