vpncloud

VpnCloud - Peer-to-Peer VPN

VpnCloud is a high performance peer-to-peer mesh VPN over UDP supporting strong encryption, NAT traversal and a simple configuration. It establishes a fully-meshed self-healing VPN network in a peer-to-peer manner with strong end-to-end encryption based on elliptic curve keys and AES-256. VpnCloud creates a virtual network interface on the host and forwards all received data via UDP to the destination. It can work on TUN devices (IP based) and TAP devices (Ethernet based).

$> vpncloud -c REMOTE_HOST:PORT -p 'mypassword' --ip 10.0.0.1/24

or as config file:

crypto:
  password: mysecret
ip: 10.0.0.1
peers:
  - REMOTE_HOST:PORT

For more information, please see the Website or the Discussions group.

Project Status

This project is still under development but has reached a somewhat stable state. VpnCloud features the following functionality:

• Automatic peer-to-peer meshing, no central servers
• Automatic reconnecting when connections are lost
• Connecting hundreds of nodes with the VPN
• High throughput and low additional latency (see performance page)
• Creating virtual network interfaces based on Ethernet (TAP) and IP (TUN)
• Strong end-to-end encryption using Curve25519 key pairs and AES methods
• Support for different forwarding/routing behaviors (Hub, Switch, Router)
• NAT and firewall traversal using hole punching
• Automatic port forwarding via UPnP
• Websocket proxy mode for restrictive environments
• Support for tunneled VLans (TAP devices)
• Support for publishing beacons to help nodes find each others
• Support for statsd monitoring
• Low memory footprint
• Single binary, no dependencies, no kernel module

Installing

Compiling from source

Prerequisites: Git, Cargo, asciidoctor

The checked-out code can be compiled with cargo build or cargo build --release (release version). The binary could then be found in target/release/vpncloud.

The tests can be run via cargo test.

Cross-Compiling & packaging

Please see the builder folder.

Contributions welcome

There are several areas in which still some work has to be done and where contributions are very welcome:

• Linux packages: VpnCloud is stable enough to be packaged for Linux distributions. Maintainers who want to package VpnCloud are very welcome.
• Help with other platforms: If you are a Rust developer with experience on Windows or MacOS your help on porting VpnCloud to those platforms is very welcome.
• Security review: The security has been implemented with strong security primitives but it would be great if a cryptography expert could verify the system.
• Feedback on use cases: Some feedback on how VpnCloud is being used and maybe some tutorials covering common use cases would be nice.

Semantic Versioning

This project uses semantic versioning.