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Croc: Easily and securely send things from one computer to another

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Re: Croc: Easily and securely send things from one computer to another

#31
post #8

A more popular and, I think, carefully analyzed alternative, from which croc was inspired, is Magic Wormhole; a good Golang implementation that compiles down to a single binary is wormhole-william: https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william/releases I believe croc has some features wormhole doesn't (and some anti-features, like being able to pick curves and hashes). But also just that it's worth knowing that Magic…

I think the main advantage that I like croc over many utilities is that it can resume file transfers from where it left off. I'm not sure if wormhole has this yet. Of course torrents do this, but I find sharing via torrenting still not super easy for the layperson.

Re: Croc: Easily and securely send things from one computer to another

#32
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also https://wormhole.app Which looking at your link I guess is unrelated

This looks very different; it requires having a server to temporarily store the file, while croc and magic-wormhole directly connect two peers (via a relayer) to send the file.

It's based on webtorrent, so it will p2p but it is dog slow for serious files.

Re: Croc: Easily and securely send things from one computer to another

#33

a recent audit claims the author "doesn't have enough resources to address" security issues: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2023/09/08/2 https://github.com/schollz/croc/issues/594 etc.

I appreciated the links to the audit, but your quote was misleading to me when taken out of context like you did. I interpreted it as basically saying that the author couldn't or wouldn't address the issues identified. The full quote was:

> The upstream author doesn't have enough resources to address them on its own and wants to develop fixes in the open. Therefore I have created GitHub issues in the upstream project and publish the full report today.

I.e. the "and wants to develop fixes in the open" part left me with a very different interpretation from when I first read your comment.

Re: Croc: Easily and securely send things from one computer to another

#34

I'm surprised it's not listed on the README directly but in case you looked for it like me :) here is what their site says about the alternative you're probably thinking of: "toss cleverly encodes port information in the code phrase, making it simple but it requires using connected computers (no firewalls) and the long random-ish code phrase is hard to “tell” someone. magic-wormhole has most everything (currently its…

https://schollz.com/tinker/croc6/

Re: Croc: Easily and securely send things from one computer to another

#36

a recent audit claims the author "doesn't have enough resources to address" security issues: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2023/09/08/2 https://github.com/schollz/croc/issues/594 etc.

There was a deadly security flaw two years ago, that required a protocol breaking fix (done within a week I believe):

https://redrocket.club/posts/croc/

But audits finding vulnerabilities are better than no audit and no known flaw.

Do these tools have iOS apps?

Re: Croc: Easily and securely send things from one computer to another

#37
post #31
post #8

A more popular and, I think, carefully analyzed alternative, from which croc was inspired, is Magic Wormhole; a good Golang implementation that compiles down to a single binary is wormhole-william: https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william/releases I believe croc has some features wormhole doesn't (and some anti-features, like being able to pick curves and hashes). But also just that it's worth knowing that Magic…

I think the main advantage that I like croc over many utilities is that it can resume file transfers from where it left off. I'm not sure if wormhole has this yet. Of course torrents do this, but I find sharing via torrenting still not super easy for the layperson.

Torrents also don't provide encryption between peers, unless you use SSL torrents, but it's clearly designed towards sharing between a group, not one-on-one transfers.

Re: Croc: Easily and securely send things from one computer to another

#39
post #36

a recent audit claims the author "doesn't have enough resources to address" security issues: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2023/09/08/2 https://github.com/schollz/croc/issues/594 etc.

There was a deadly security flaw two years ago, that required a protocol breaking fix (done within a week I believe): https://redrocket.club/posts/croc/ But audits finding vulnerabilities are better than no audit and no known flaw. Do these tools have iOS apps?

My CVE feed just had a raft on croc:

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-43616

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-43617

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-43618

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-43619

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-43620

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-43621

I will stick with wormhole-william, thank you very much.

Re: Croc: Easily and securely send things from one computer to another

#40
post #29

Which public server does it use by default? I'm surprised the docs don't mention it. More generally, it feels like in 2023 that connecting two computers via a public relay ought to be a solved problem, on the level of, like, DNS. Or maybe it is and I haven't heard?

It is! RustDesk has a really great 2-pane file manager for sending files. Works really well.
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