Rethinking Obfuscation

2016-12-16 Thread Paul Swanson
Hi,

I'd just like to revisit a topic that recently came on the mailing list, 
traffic obfuscation.

Firstly, I'd like to state that I'm merely a grateful user of Wireguard, not a 
contributor.

That's relevant because the only way I can get reliable, uncensored Internet is 
with the help of Wireguard. And the only reason that is so, is because 
Wireguard is not yet a popular protocol.

I don't want to be so bold as to make an outright "feature request" for traffic 
obfuscation, but I would like to make my case for it's acceptance.

Right now, in many countries there are extreme filtering practices in place. 
And I realise that there's an argument for addressing this at a policy level 
but sadly that thinking is just not useful for literally billions of people 
(https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/freedom-net-2016). It's a 
different political context.

It's easy to feel comfortable from a western democratic context with our 
relative sense of freedom, but our governments have already built the most 
pervasive instruments of mass surveillance ever known. We've a lot of trust and 
people who've brazenly betrayed us. We're just building security infrastructure 
on the assumption we'll be continued to be allowed to use it for privacy.

For old VPN protocols such as IPSEC, OpenVPN and the like there's no hope. 
These are easily blocked by breaking the handshake processes, at the very 
least. Systems like TOR are praised by privacy advocates but are all but 
useless in the face of state-level / ISP filtering.

So while the problem might originate at a political level, this is not always 
resolvable. And right now there's precious little offering a technical 
solution. The only reliable approach I'm seeing widely employed is proprietary 
implementations of Open Source VPNs. VPN providers are making various 
obfuscation tweaks to things like OpenVPN to enable there services to work in 
places like China. The problem here is at least two fold. Firstly, it's 
proprietary! Need I say more here. Secondly, I don't see why any rational 
person should have confidence in these companies' cryptographic expertise.

I'd humbly like to propose a change in philosophy:

That obfuscation is a necessary, intermediary safeguard on the road to policy 
change.

That at least making provision for compatibility with obfuscation tools is 
relevant to the mission of projects such as Wireguard.

That providing expertise or guidance on how to obfuscate the Wireguard 
protocol, in the least miserable way, is a good and worthwhile thing.

Once again, thanks for all your work on the project. I love working with the 
userspace tools, they're well thought through. I love how resilient and well 
the protocol performs in the real world with miserable network latencies and 
giant evil firewalls. I love that it's open source.

I just hope I can keep using it where it really counts.

Paul S.


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Rethinking Obfuscation

2016-12-16 Thread Paul Swanson
Hi,

I'd just like to revisit a topic that recently came on the mailing list, VPN 
obfuscation.

Firstly, I'd like to state that I'm merely a grateful user of Wireguard, not a 
contributor.

That's relevant because the only way I can get reliable, uncensored Internet is 
with the help of Wireguard. And the only reason that is so, is because 
Wireguard is not yet a popular protocol.

I don't want to be so bold as to make an outright "feature request" for traffic 
obfuscation, but I would like to make my case for it's acceptance.

Right now, in many countries there are extreme filtering practices in place. 
And I realise that there's an argument for addressing this at a policy level 
but sadly that thinking is just not useful for literally billions of people 
(https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/freedom-net-2016). It's a 
different political context.

It's easy to feel comfortable from a western democratic context with our 
relative sense of freedom, but our governments have already built the most 
pervasive instruments of mass surveillance ever known. We've a lot of trust and 
people who've brazenly betrayed us. We're just building security infrastructure 
on the assumption we'll be continued to be allowed to use it for privacy.

For old VPN protocols such as IPSEC, OpenVPN and the like there's no hope. 
These are easily blocked by breaking the handshake processes, at the very 
least. Systems like TOR are praised by privacy advocates but are all but 
useless in the face of state-level / ISP filtering.

So while the problem might originate at a political level, this is not always 
resolvable. And right now there's precious little offering a technical 
solution. The only reliable approach I'm seeing widely employed is proprietary 
implementations of Open Source VPNs. VPN providers are making various 
obfuscation tweaks to things like OpenVPN to enable there services to work in 
places like China. The problem here is at least two fold. Firstly, it's 
proprietary! Need I say more here. Secondly, I don't see why any rational 
person should have confidence in these companies' cryptographic expertise.

I'd like to propose a change in philosophy.

That obfuscation in a necessary, intermediary safeguard on the road to policy 
change.

That at least making provision for compatibility with obfuscation tools is 
relevant to the mission of projects such as Wireguard.

That providing expertise or guidance on how to obfuscate the Wireguard 
protocol, in the least miserable way, is a good and worthwhile thing.

Once again, thanks for all your work on the project. I love working with the 
userspace tools, they're really well thought through. I love how resilient and 
well the protocol performs in the real world with miserable network latencies 
and giant evil firewalls. I love that it's open source.

I just hope I can keep using it where it really counts.

Paul S.


Sent from [ProtonMail](https://protonmail.com), encrypted email based in 
Switzerland.___
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awesome mips performance

2016-12-16 Thread Jason A. Donenfeld
Hey guys,

The latest snapshot is broken on big endian. This commit [1] fixes it,
and will be released in the next snapshot shortly. Sorry about that.
Lots of churn with the siphash implementation.

With the recent changes to add alignment in the headers, I now get 60
megabits per second on a super crappy TL-WR841N board (QCA9533)
transmitting over the internet. This is awesome performance -- a good
milestone for little CPUs.

Jason

[1] 
https://git.zx2c4.com/WireGuard/commit/?id=094e95e736723075d586d7a006c5525f2e3a74d4
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Re: [WireGuard] Wireguard in OpenWRT/LEDE: FYI: Pull Request

2016-12-16 Thread Jason A. Donenfeld
Hey Dan,

I just submitted a pull request to bump the package and add this
conditional: https://github.com/openwrt/packages/pull/3664

Jason
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