Vulnerabilities exploited in VPN products used worldwide • Hacker News Board

Re: Vulnerabilities exploited in VPN products used worldwide

#61

Post by tptacek » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 9:51 PM UTC

xoa wrote: post #39

tptacek wrote: post #7

Commercial enterprise VPN products are an open sewer, and there aren't any, from any vendor, that I trust. I don't like OpenVPN or strongSwan, but you'd be better off with either of them than you would be with a commercial VPN appliance. The gold standard, as ever, is Wireguard.

> The gold standard, as ever, is Wireguard. Not disagreeing with you about the state of commercial VPN products, but regarding WG specifically. Something I don't see in the other replies just yet is that Wireguard doesn't yet have an ecosystem around it, but is designed for that in a good way. By which I mean, it follows the Unix philosophy of focusing on one specific task and doing it very well, and it has succeeded…

It depends on what you're using a VPN to accomplish. If you're talking about rolling out an enterprise-wide solution that does site-to-site and small branch offices and remote access, I agree: WireGuard isn't there yet (an enterprising security engineer might get it there!).

But most of the VPNs I encounter in my work are not that; rather, they're simple remote access mechanisms, addressing the same problem an SSH tunnel would, but more cleanly. WireGuard is better than the alternatives for these common-case simple remote access VPNs.

Additionally, there are lots of random tasks that you might want to deploy a simple point-to-point VPN to solve (peering, cross-account cloud access, etc) that OpenVPN and strongSwan are just too painful to set up. WireGuard is approximately as easy to set up as an SSH tunnel; the tunnel wants you to map ports, and WireGuard wants IP addresses. I imagine it might see a lot of deployments that legacy VPN protocols won't.

Re: Vulnerabilities exploited in VPN products used worldwide

#62

Post by tptacek » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 9:52 PM UTC

mr_puzzled wrote: post #15

tptacek wrote: post #7

Commercial enterprise VPN products are an open sewer, and there aren't any, from any vendor, that I trust. I don't like OpenVPN or strongSwan, but you'd be better off with either of them than you would be with a commercial VPN appliance. The gold standard, as ever, is Wireguard.

What do you think about cloudflare's vpn offerings? 1.1.1.1 and cf access?

My opinion is that Cloud Flare forked WireGuard, taking Jason Donenfeld's design work without compensation or, from what I can tell, even a sincere thank-you, and built something from it that isn't fully compatible with WireGuard itself. I hope someone else builds a real Rust WireGuard and crushes them with it.

Re: Vulnerabilities exploited in VPN products used worldwide

#63

Post by tptacek » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 9:53 PM UTC

throwaway2048 wrote: post #17

ihuman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you prefer Wireguard over Openvpn?

Wireguard is an extremely simple protocol, basically as simple as it is possible for an encrypted VPN protocol to be. OpenVPN uses TLS (in TCP mode) and a custom protocol based off of TLS in UDP mode, its design is vastly over complicated by the use of x.509 certificates, and in general is just kind of ugly and kludgy (and slow).

It's "simple" in a way that is very difficult to achieve, and in many ways more modern than OpenVPN. The better word might be "clean".

Re: Vulnerabilities exploited in VPN products used worldwide

#64

Post by faitswulff » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #7

Commercial enterprise VPN products are an open sewer, and there aren't any, from any vendor, that I trust. I don't like OpenVPN or strongSwan, but you'd be better off with either of them than you would be with a commercial VPN appliance. The gold standard, as ever, is Wireguard.

> I don't like OpenVPN or strongSwan, but you'd be better off with either of them than you would be with a commercial VPN appliance.

How does Streisand compare?

Re: Vulnerabilities exploited in VPN products used worldwide

#65

Post by tptacek » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

Enginerrrd wrote: post #31

big_chungus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using it for almost a year with literally zero issues. The closes to a problem was the lack of a windows client (though there was a third-party option a used for a while), which is now fixed. If this is alpha-quality software, I look forward to seeing like what the beta and release versions look.

I'm also using it, but the reality is that the Wireguard team states it's not production ready for good reason. If your threat model includes state level actors or you are a high value target to sophisticated cracking groups, I wouldn't use wireguard yet. A lot of cryptographic protocols have come and gone, once thought secure. And 10-100x as many implementations of a specific protocol have fallen to mistakes, even b…

I don't think you'll find a lot of software or cryptographic security engineers who would tell you that you'd be more secure using OpenVPN or strongSwan instead of WireGuard, since the reverse thing is actually true.

Re: Vulnerabilities exploited in VPN products used worldwide

#66

Post by tptacek » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

GhettoMaestro wrote: post #12

tptacek wrote: post #7

Commercial enterprise VPN products are an open sewer, and there aren't any, from any vendor, that I trust. I don't like OpenVPN or strongSwan, but you'd be better off with either of them than you would be with a commercial VPN appliance. The gold standard, as ever, is Wireguard.

Lots of loose language in your post. Show me a FIPS140-2 Wireguard implementation.

I mean this seriously and have chosen these words carefully: FIPS can shove its entire self up its own ass.

There is maybe nothing in the industry that has done more damage to cryptographic security than government cryptography standards.

Re: Vulnerabilities exploited in VPN products used worldwide

#67

Post by tptacek » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 9:57 PM UTC

faitswulff wrote: post #64

tptacek wrote: post #7

Commercial enterprise VPN products are an open sewer, and there aren't any, from any vendor, that I trust. I don't like OpenVPN or strongSwan, but you'd be better off with either of them than you would be with a commercial VPN appliance. The gold standard, as ever, is Wireguard.

> I don't like OpenVPN or strongSwan, but you'd be better off with either of them than you would be with a commercial VPN appliance. How does Streisand compare?

I would avoid Streisand and recommend Algo, which does approximately the same thing, but safer.

Re: Vulnerabilities exploited in VPN products used worldwide

#68

Post by ohazi » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 9:57 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #61

xoa wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The gold standard, as ever, is Wireguard. Not disagreeing with you about the state of commercial VPN products, but regarding WG specifically. Something I don't see in the other replies just yet is that Wireguard doesn't yet have an ecosystem around it, but is designed for that in a good way. By which I mean, it follows the Unix philosophy of focusing on one specific task and doing it very well, and it has succeeded…

It depends on what you're using a VPN to accomplish. If you're talking about rolling out an enterprise-wide solution that does site-to-site and small branch offices and remote access, I agree: WireGuard isn't there yet (an enterprising security engineer might get it there!). But most of the VPNs I encounter in my work are not that; rather, they're simple remote access mechanisms, addressing the same problem an SSH tu…

If all of my remote access can be done via ssh {+ local/remote forwarding}, is there a reason for me to consider wireguard?

Re: Vulnerabilities exploited in VPN products used worldwide

#69

Post by tptacek » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 9:58 PM UTC

numbsafari wrote: post #11

tptacek wrote: post #7

Commercial enterprise VPN products are an open sewer, and there aren't any, from any vendor, that I trust. I don't like OpenVPN or strongSwan, but you'd be better off with either of them than you would be with a commercial VPN appliance. The gold standard, as ever, is Wireguard.

The problem is, in a lot of enterprise environments, you can’t rely on a tool that lists itself as non-production ready, and therefore doesn’t / won’t have CVE, etc. Scroll to the bottom of the wireguard.com site. It’s right on the tin, so to speak. I’m very excited for wireguard, but have some empathy for large enterprises on this one.

I have a lot of empathy for enterprises on this, and while I don't agree with you about "production-ready" (and don't think Jason Donenfeld does either), I do agree with you about giant insurance companies using WireGuard. They're stuck with horrible commercial VPN appliances. You don't have to be.

Re: Vulnerabilities exploited in VPN products used worldwide

#70

Post by tptacek » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

ohazi wrote: post #68

tptacek wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what you're using a VPN to accomplish. If you're talking about rolling out an enterprise-wide solution that does site-to-site and small branch offices and remote access, I agree: WireGuard isn't there yet (an enterprising security engineer might get it there!). But most of the VPNs I encounter in my work are not that; rather, they're simple remote access mechanisms, addressing the same problem an SSH tu…

If all of my remote access can be done via ssh {+ local/remote forwarding}, is there a reason for me to consider wireguard?

Yes. WireGuard is cryptographically superior to SSH, attaches at a network layer without fussy interactions with a Unix shell (that then also needs to be accounted for in a security model), has higher performance, is practically bulletproof in terms of keeping connections alive, and gets you direct access to whatever resources you've provisioned the network to provide.

I wouldn't ding someone using SSH tunnels (carefully), but in a de novo design, I would always recommend WireGuard first.