Magic Wormhole: Get things from one computer to another, safely • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by simianparrot » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 9:37 AM UTC

Etheryte wrote: post #40

brendyn wrote: post #14

This project made me learn about and attempt to implement the SPAKE2 protocol and HKDF as an exercise. It's quite fascinating. It lets you upgrade a short password to a long key, but requires trusting a server to rate limit attempts on brute-forcing that short password. It seems difficult to find a practical use case for it tho. Because it's only relevant when it is impractical to send a long key. But if you think fo…

That's all nice and dandy, but what about sending data the other way, from a phone to a desktop? Meticulously typing in long strings of text with no mistakes is not really a practical solution for the vast majority of users.

QR codes?

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

#42

Post by leetrout » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 9:42 AM UTC

simianparrot wrote: post #41

Etheryte wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all nice and dandy, but what about sending data the other way, from a phone to a desktop? Meticulously typing in long strings of text with no mistakes is not really a practical solution for the vast majority of users.

QR codes?

Not all desktops have cameras.

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

#43

Post by vlasky » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 9:43 AM UTC

Uehreka wrote: post #36

vlasky wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wormhole William is available for Android devices: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.sanford.wor...

I need iOS and iPadOS. Although ideally there’d be a GUI that could work on all of the “mainstream” OSes, since most of my problem here is that I frequently need to move files between devices in different walled or unwalled gardens.

For desktop PCs, Rymdport (formerly wormhole-gui) may be suitable. It's cross-platform with pre-built binaries for FreeBSD, Linux, macOS and Windows on x86-64 and arm64:

https://github.com/Jacalz/rymdport

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

#44

Post by benoliver999 » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 9:49 AM UTC

I use this very specifically for setting up new machines. It's one of those where I don't use it much, but when I do it has saved me a whole lot of time, and it's worked well every time.

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

#45

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 9:55 AM UTC

Etheryte wrote: post #40

brendyn wrote: post #14

This project made me learn about and attempt to implement the SPAKE2 protocol and HKDF as an exercise. It's quite fascinating. It lets you upgrade a short password to a long key, but requires trusting a server to rate limit attempts on brute-forcing that short password. It seems difficult to find a practical use case for it tho. Because it's only relevant when it is impractical to send a long key. But if you think fo…

That's all nice and dandy, but what about sending data the other way, from a phone to a desktop? Meticulously typing in long strings of text with no mistakes is not really a practical solution for the vast majority of users.

[deleted]

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

#46

Post by krageon » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 10:05 AM UTC

hshdhdhehd wrote: post #39

skeledrew wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It uses a rendezvous server to handle connecting.

Googled. > Because of firewall network address translation (NAT) issues, rendezvous protocols generally require that there be at least one unblocked and un-NATed server that lets the peers locate each other and initiate concurrent packets at each other. So probably cant help with a VPC unless you pierce a hole for it. I guess this makes sense, since by design this shouldn't be possible.

The point of the intermediate server is so that you can NAT hole punch, otherwise it has little point (except maybe as a relay, which is a bad solution).

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

#47

Post by AAAAaccountAAAA » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 10:07 AM UTC

I did use it some time ago, but I remember the user experience being somewhat confusing, since there are multiple similarly named tools around, which don't seem to be interoperable. Still, a cool concept.

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

#48

Post by Etheryte » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 10:08 AM UTC

simianparrot wrote: post #41

Etheryte wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all nice and dandy, but what about sending data the other way, from a phone to a desktop? Meticulously typing in long strings of text with no mistakes is not really a practical solution for the vast majority of users.

QR codes?

The vast majority of desktops do not have a camera.

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

#49

Post by samuel » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 10:19 AM UTC

Recently learnt about tailscale funnel, and I love it, I would use for everything.

tailscale funnel --set-path

(The path is needed because there are lots of bots who scan tailscale hostnames).

This works if the sender is tech savvy (and a tailscale user) but not in the other direction.

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

#50

Post by placardloop » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 10:39 AM UTC

Etheryte wrote: post #48

simianparrot wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QR codes?

The vast majority of desktops do not have a camera.

You can still generate the QR code in the desktop and scan it with your phone camera. The device receiving the file does not have to be the device that scans the code.