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> There’s lots of things you can blame for killing the open Internet, but I think NAT was one of the earliest. Running a server used to be trivial: run an executable, tell people your address, done... It also trained everyone to think client‐server is natural. “My device talks to The Cloud which talks to other devices” feels normal, when that feeling originated as an artifact of address scarcity.
A lot of this feels like a requiem for the days when the only people on the Internet were "high-computer-skill" type folks. Most people will gravitate to "user-friendly" solutions: Gmail and other managed email providers were popular because they didn't stop working when you shut down your computer to save electricity, when your server's hard drive crashed, when you upgraded your computer to something with a faster processor, more RAM, and a newer operating system. It was hard enough to educate laypeople about URLs and email addresses (AOL keywords, anyone?), let alone a combination of random numbers in an IP address, or convincing people to register domain names.
Yes, NAT shoved fences into a network that was all about connecting everybody. But we'd still end up with server-client cloud architectures, even if we had started with IPv6 in the beginning. ISPs would have just sold highly restrictive firewalls as part of their home-install basic boxes, and we'd still have ended up with those fences.
> A lot of this feels like a requiem for the days when the only people on the Internet were "high-computer-skill" type folks.
FWIW I (writer of blog post) am 21 years old and just a bitch lol
> Running a server used to be trivial: run an executable, tell people your address, done...
This works, until you have more than one person accessing your server. Then you need to worry about accounts, credentials, data isolation, etc. And then if a couple of people connect to your server and start using it, you have to worry about staying online, staying updated, backing up the data. But other than that... yes, trivial.
And just to be really explicit, you always have more than one person accessing your server, and most of the time they are unwanted users trying to break in.
> most of the time they are unwanted users trying to break in.
Exactly. Of all the reasons why the average person doesn't have an Internet-visible server, NAT, I would say, is pretty far down on the list.
I mean, no, you don't have to worry about all that stuff unless the business logic demands it. The OP is entirely correct for eg just serving a static file.
Calling NAT the original sin is a serious exaggeration. Carrier Grade NAT (CGNAT) is a truly evil concept that restricts the freedoms of the CGNATed users. But regular NAT is fine as long as you can control it. "No one wanting to bother with port forwarding" is largely a matter of shitty UX on the home gateway side and laziness on the side of the operator. Same with UPnP.
If anything, NAT has saved millions of wildly insecure devices running unpatched old Windows versions from getting pwned the second they connect to the open internet.
I don't think that you can draw the line between NAT and CGNAT. The fact that single NAT works as well as it does is an argument for why it is ok to double NAT with CGNAT.
The conceit behind NAT is that 99% of traffic over the router will be client-server and the last 1% can get away with separately negotiating with the router to get inbound traffic.
For example my ISP Xfinity by default will put your router in CGNAT space (and ipv6) but if you request port forwarding from a mobile app the upstream router will assign you a ipv4 address and it all works. NAT is considered fine because adding roadblocks to server hosting is a acceptable tradeoff.
The reason they i think they can be so flexible is that they likey have a ipv6 backbone to route to all the customers and ipv4 is not used for routing but as a extra service layered on top with packing the 48 bits of ipv4 and port inside a ipv6 address via MAP-T
Yeah NAT is still "every household gets a public IP address". This is a perfectly good foundation for an open Internet. You can still host servers in your home. I did this a lot as a kid and learned a ton from it. It's maybe not super elegant but it works.
Going to a model of "you don't get a public IP address, all traffic must go through servers other people host for you" is what finally kills the open Internet. It's okay enough for cell phones where it's a hack to work around TCP/IP's lack of roaming support, but it should be illegal to deploy as residential Internet.
>If anything, NAT has saved millions of wildly insecure devices running unpatched old Windows versions from getting pwned the second they connect to the open internet.
I don't think NAT being a janky ad hoc firewall does anyone a service. It shields the devices enough to keep the developers oblivious about security, but not enough to stop them from connecting to arbitrary hosts. This perpetuates the humongous botnet ecosystem.
> If anything, NAT has saved millions of wildly insecure devices running unpatched old Windows versions from getting pwned the second they connect to the open internet.
I doubt it.
Very few devices do port NAT without also doing firewalling, since firewalling is simpler.
> "No one wanting to bother with port forwarding" is largely a matter of shitty UX on the home gateway side and laziness on the side of the operator. Same with UPnP.
If you try to use those port forwarding hacks, you force every single piece of software to deal with the fact that the IP address it sees for itself is not the IP address its peer sees for it. And you force every single protocol design to allow for that possibility. Add in UPNP, and now you have to implement a whole extra (badly designed) protocol in parallel with the actual application.
It's not trivial to even discover the address your peer is seeing; even now there's a huge diversity of nasty unreliable hacks for doing it.
HTTP isn't the world. In fact, HTTP becoming "the world" was another part of the problem.
NAT only serves as the janky inbound default deny because IPv4 doesn't have the address space. There are very few things NAT solves in a world without address exhaustion; the only one I can think of off hand is a janky method of forcing return routing in enterprise environments where symmetric rooting is needed.
In an alternate universe (or a current one with IPv6) every home router would have a default deny inbound security policy, and home admins could punch holes as needed the way they do today with port forwarding.
> If anything, NAT has saved millions of wildly insecure devices running unpatched old Windows versions from getting pwned the second they connect to the open internet.
Its definitely the opposite. People started ignoring security because its "natted" anyways, even though NAT was never supposed to be security-critical. Thats what firewalls are for.
People (by which I mean average computer users) didn't "start ignoring security", they never bothered to unignore it in the first place. Early Windows editions didn't even ship with a firewall at all, people were rawdogging the internet out of the box without ever stopping to consider the consequences.
I remember in the Windows 95/98 days asking my friend for his IP address and then browsing through my windows explorer to his mum's fully shared windows C drive. She had her computer plugged directly into the modem and was using ICS to share the net to my friends computer.
I sent them a screenshot of her shared drive through ICQ, and not long after she bought a router.
... because people (by which I mean software vendors who should have known better) irresponsibly failed to create secure systems for those average users to use. A whole lot of which came to be justified by "it'll be behind a firewall" thinking.
Did you forget dialup was a thing? No one created anything for home users thinking it would be behind some firewall because as said Windows didn't ship with one, and because the dominant way of customers getting online was dialup, giving a public IP to every user.
Software was created with no security because no one demanded it because no one cared. Technologies that came later did not create that situation.
The typical NAT implementation ("PAT", single public IP, RFC-1918 network) gives you an implicit stateful firewall denying unsoliticed inbound traffic. Most people don't need anything else.
>If anything, NAT has saved millions of wildly insecure devices running unpatched old Windows versions from getting pwned the second they connect to the open internet.
This might not be a good thing. Perhaps if there had been no protection for those odious operating systems, they'd have died the horrible deaths they earned decades ago. We should only want to protect things we intend to keep, after all, and none of us wanted to keep that garbage.
All of the current OS choices are insecure by design. The all operate programs with the ambient authority of the user. While this was fine for the corporate world of AT&T in the 1970s, and the classroom in the 1980s, it's insane to use it in the era of ubiquitous persistent megabit Internet connectivity, and mobile code.
I know of zero systems that can survive exposure to the raw Internet, unpatched and without administrative oversight, with uptimes of years.
>I know of zero systems that can survive exposure to the raw Internet
Sure. And as long as nothing has to survive exposure to the raw Internet, no one will build anything that could survive it. Not sure why that's so difficult to understand. You seem to think that the protection is the reaction to dangerous operating systems, when it's the cause.
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The designers of the internet made one fundamental mistake, namely applying meatspace norms to cyberspace.
In the "real world", you don't really need that much security. Your actual security comes from the fact that all the worst criminals are already locked up, most of the would-be criminals are afraid of being locked up, and if somebody does actually commit a crime, they will get locked up and won't be able to do it again for a good while. A lot of real-world security is about post-factum detection (think alarms, CCTV, panic buttons etc), because in the real world, detection and prevention are two sides of the same coin.
This only works because if a real-world crime happens, the criminal by definition is in the same location as the victim, and law enforcement cares most about the community they serve. If the criminal is across the world, as is the case in cyberspace, even if it's a friendly country, it's often "not their problem". This means internet systems need actual security, and NAT provides exactly that.
If not for NAT, we'd all need a firewall, and things would be almost if not exactly the same. In the real world, "leave things relatively open, because locks are mostly for keeping honest people honest" is a valid strategy. This strategy doesn't work on the internet.
> If not for NAT, we'd all need a firewall
You still need a firewall regardless of NAT. Otherwise, every time you take your computer outside of your home, you're no longer protected. Any attacker or compromised device on your hotel, airport, or coffee shop wifi network would have direct access to your machine.
I think about this frequently. IMO, geographic sparsity is the biggest difference. Every malcontent on the planet just can't reach my door, and the physical reality of movement through space means they can't reach my door, AND every other door on the planet, in the same way they can reach every IP, or practically every IP.
There's probably a field of study with vocabulary and accompanying proofs of significant rigor that prove or disprove this. Maybe they'll stop by our little subthread and clear it up.
Uhh... you can have a firewall without NAT, including one at the perimeter.
This is a very common misunderstanding. NAT and firewalls are separate concepts. You can also have NAT with no meaningful firewall -- a port remapping NAT that allows anything through.
Most IPv6 networks are firewalled but there's no NAT.
I remember times before NAT and SSL
You could share things easily, sure, but anyone could get hacked pretty easily and very targetted.
After NAT, sharing was still easy lots of 'piracy' apps, various messengers with NAT passthrough
Both before and after you needed to be technical, you can't ask someone that doesnt know about computers to set up an FTP server, and if they did it would be a nightmare and they'd likely share their whole drive
Same goes for anything else.
Anyway, we'll get the whole non-nat with IPv6, let's see what that brings
It brings the requirement for a firewall on every endpoint with a unique address. My Phone often has an ipv6 address (found out this holiday wen I couldn't resolve one of sites because of an orphan ipv6 entry nobody noticed), and has little problems. Perhaps there is also "firewalling" on the router and the phone can't even have incoming connections. Not sure. In any case, the phone seems to do fine.
> Perhaps there is also "firewalling" on the router and the phone can't even have incoming connections. Not sure.
Correct. Every home wifi router worth its salt will firewall incoming connections by default, whether v4 or v6. It's then possible (unless it's some shitty ISP-provided locked down device) to add specific allow rules, or allow all for a particular client.
egress is typically wide open, although sometimes they lock down particular protocols by default (eg. smtp, bittorrent)
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> Not sure. In any case, the phone seems to do fine.
That's mostly because a phone is very locked down, can you run an accessible ftp server on your phone?
It's also not windows
For android, the answer is yes (without rooting being required).
> without rooting being required
If you want to use the standard port, that's only true as of very recently, though, see https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/218578943#comment17
Also on iOS, though I've only done this over Wi-Fi, and have no idea whether telcos expose open ports to the (IPv6) Internet.
Phone OSs tend to pay a lot more attention to security than the crap they put on consumer-grade routers, "smart" TVs and cheap webcams.
I would invest in a proper firewall for the entire home before opening up anything to the world, IPv6 or not.
Firewalls, both at the perimeter and locally, was what patched over this. NAT had nothing to do with it.
You can have firewalls with no NAT just fine. You can also have NAT with no firewall.
NAT is not about security and never was. It's about stretching the IPv4 supply and allowing each endpoint to just get one precious V4 IP.
> Anyway, we'll get the whole non-nat with IPv6, let's see what that brings
I'll believe it when I see it. So far it doesn't look like IPv6 will win anytime soon.
And even if it wins, it won't matter much, since it is only one of many issues with the current Internet that prevents people from connecting to each other. Even with IPv6 you'd still have no way to find the other person and the moment they hop between networks, their IPv6 address won't stay the same either.
Ultimately I think none of this will be solved at the low level, it needs something like Iroh or libp2p where you build a new network on top of the Internet infrastructure, so that you can have things like persistent cryptographic identities and addresses that you can carry with you, largely independent of the underlying network architecture.
I absolutely plan to NAT my home, I don't see a good reason to do otherwise.
I don't see a reason why my machine addresses should change over time... then again, most shouldn't have direct internet access anyway, a http proxy on firewall should be enough.
> I don't see a reason why my machine addresses should change over time
You can still use fixed addresses locally if you want, its not like IPv6 is forcing you to use the prefix assigned if you just want to communicate locally over never-changing addresses.
You can have your computers be fd01::1, fd01::2, fd01::3, etc, and talk to everything on their local addresses when wanting to stay local. And then when they want to talk on the public internet they can just use whatever public addresses like 2600:1700:53c2:2573:4c:c001:dead:beef based on whatever prefix your ISP gives you.
Its not like your devices have to only have a single IP address.
Well, any 3G or later mobile backbone is SIP+SCTP over IPv6. So in many ways it won already
My phone, on 4g, is not IPv6
At home it can be if I connect t to my ip6 ssid, but there’s a stateful firewall which may as well nat.
Weird, I used to remember that going to test-ipv6.com on my mobile (on 4G and 5G) used to fail all the tests. But today it passes.
Well, good to know!
NATs are also firewalls. I think people forget that before NATs, when you would install Windows, the minute you connected it to the internet, you had to rush to update it before a virus would infect it. The OS of the 90s weren't secure enough to be exposed to the WAN.
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I miss the old days of ICQ and just dragging a file onto the person you are sending your file and bam, done like dinner.
The consequences are so much more significant than people seem to realize.
Because of NAT, hierarchy (centralized servers) is the foundational design pattern of the internet, and anyone who wants any semblance of anarchy (decentralized networks) must use a workaround that is itself hierarchical and costly. We are all interconnected, but only a wealthy few can truly speak fist.
while i agree with your sentiment, i personally think that the foundational design pattern of the internet as a network is highly decentralized. once you get public IP space and the infrastructure required to talk BGP, making decentralized designs is actually quite easy.
The issue that ipv4 exhausting and "solutions" around it like NAT are making it very hard for actual users (bussiness, people etc) to get access to public IP space without strings attached.
IPv6 solves a lot of this, especially because IP space is so massive LIR's don't need to be so spare with giving out address space.
The far larger issue we have is that applications are ingrained in a client server mindset, in which big incumbents want to have this architecture because it forces control from the server towards to client. And control usually also means having the data itself, which is where the real value lies.
I agree that assumptions on the application side are the bigger issue, but it's less about encouraging client/server architecture in general. It's often very helpful, even among peers, to drop into a mode where somebody is wearing the client hat and somebody else is wearing the server hat.
The sin here is the hierarchy imposed by SSL and its infatuation with server names. Its says: these people are lords, they can wear the server hat. As for the peasants, your client hats are over there. If we catch a peasant wearing a server hat, the browsers will make them look like a criminal.
Our applications have evolved accordingly.
I think its funny everyone thinks that ISPs, Device Manufacturers, and Cloud Providers are going to let your connect back directly to your "home" with IOT devices.
Absolutely not. They can charge your $9.99/mo so you can connect their craptastic app to their craptastic cloud so you can "use their app from anywhere".
Reading the comments:
Why do so many people still think NAT equals firewall when they're not directly related?
I guess it's because they're normally packaged together for practical reasons. They're both packet handling functions often performed in the same place. But they are NOT the same and you can have either one without the other. Most IPv6 networks have firewalls, and it's possible to have NAT that liberally passes anything.
I wonder how much this misconception has delayed V6 adoption? "But I'll be wide open without NAT!" No, you can have a firewall. Most IPv6 routers have stateful firewalls on by default.
You are correct.
The reason NAT is seen as security on home networks is that, absent a firewall, it acts as a default deny to inbound traffic.
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NAT made distinction between PCs and servers too broad.
Time to set up IPV6.
Or just use an ipv4 address. It works I swear
In regions where IPv4 addresses are scarce, you may not even have a single public IPv4 address. I'm fortunate to have one, but still needs NAT.
IPv4 costs are tiny compared to the cost of providing an internet connection.
It's free money to your ISP. A lot of ISPs us CGNAT.
CGNAT is also not cheap and very complex from a architectural point of view.
Vendors have been pushing it though, because implementing IPV6 only somehow is still a very, very scary thing for large ISP's to pull off.
what should happen is it should be very easy to deploy ipv6/4 translation mechanisms in ipv4 only networks, this would allow easy interopability and make it easier for the large networks to push IPV6.
Not every place is the same.
Do you have any example where leasing an ipv4 block from a NIC directly costs more than 5$ per IPv4 address per year?
China has very few IPv4 addresses per capita. Here in Hangzhou, China, I have to pay China Telecom 850 CNY per year just to get an IPv4 address. That's not a trivial amount of money for us. And among the three major telecom operators, only one even offers this service.
Yes. My ISP will rent me a single IPv4 address for $10 per month. Or I can use DHCP, where my IPv4 address can change at their whim.
> Yes. My ISP will rent me a single IPv4 address for $10 per month.
At that price point you can get a small vm, but if you have a dedicated server you want to use on-prem, 10$/mo seems like a reasonable price.
> Or I can use DHCP, where my IPv4 address can change at their whim.
Check the dhcp.lease to make sure, I used to think that, then I looked at the dhcp lease and the IP was being reserved for up to 48 hours of disconnection. I went years without it ever being released.
Phone operators won't necessarily transmit this information to you, the true ISP operator is the DHCP server. Not only is it more knowledgeable, but DHCPd has no incentive to upsell you, just provides you with what it is configured to.
I'd even go as far as checking if you can send parameters during the dhcp lease request, maybe you can request a longer lease on the IP.
There's a right way to do things, it's not trivial to discern from the wrong way to do it, but once you see it, you notice that you lose almost nothing, it's not like the 'wrong' way is simpler, it's just 'wronger', all the way through. I guess the reason they persist is sunk-cost fallacy, the businesses and people that went with NAT then developed STUN, and then they developed ICE, and then they develop Tailscale, every time you need to invent a bigger spade to dig you out of the hole and into a deeper one.
Or you can just use IPv4. But aghast, you have to pay 10$/month (or learn DHCP)
Counting the cost of creating the company so you can actually deal directly with a NIC?
Every. Single. Individual. End. User. Device. Should. Be. Addressable. Given that there are more such devices out there then there are IPv4 addresses to begin with, cost doesn't even come into it.
>Counting the cost of creating the company so you can actually deal directly with a NIC?
No, the question was taking the price that the NIC sells the IP blocks at. Understanding that in order to get 1 IPv4 address you will be buying from a distributor at a markup, but still, with Wholesale prices at 0.6$ (LACNIC) to 2.5$ (ARIN) per IP address per year, even with a markup of 300%, we are still at filthy cheap prices (2.4$/year to 10$/year)
>Every. Single. Individual. End. User. Device. Should. Be. Addressable. Given that there are more such devices out there then there are IPv4 addresses to begin with, cost doesn't even come into it.
Oh, ok, I was writing mostly about server side IPv4 assignment. I guess your position is a much stronger stance than mine, I argue that all servers should have an IP(v4) adress, you argue that every client device should. In that sense, consider that there's a lot of users, on this website even, that insist on running hosts without a dedicated IP address. There's lower hanging fruit.
Sending files to another would be easy if only the services that allow doing this - over WebRTC - didn’t sell out to sketchy advertisers constantly.
I have to look up which service is still good to use every time.
Check out Bitbang:
http://github.com/richlegrand/bitbang-cli
I've been using it and it certainly has the potential. I signed up for Cloudflare's TURN server which you use with bitbang and it gets you 1TB free data transfer per month.
That's because they're actually not "sending files to another". A hairpin service has to be provided for double NATed scenarios and a rendezvous service has to be provided for all cases. There's no magic about WebRTC that makes it actually p2p.
> Why you don’t have a FTP server
May be due to US DoD holding large amounts of IPv4 for no reason
People have forgotten, or weren't alive, but NAT was created and deployed originally by users. The problem they were solving wasn't "how do we stop running out of addresses" but rather "how do we save money". That's because early ISPs had hit on the idea of charging more for more address space, as a way to differentiate between small and large customers. So you could buy a cheaper service with one IP and use NAT to get your whole organization online.
I was alive and don't think I've forgotten. What distinguished large from small users was the width of the pipe. Address space charging was never important as a revenue driver. There were some attempts to charge for address space to keep people from getting huge blocks they didn't use. The long term solution for that was, of course, supposed to be IPv6.
If I wanted to blame large corporate "users" for NAT (which I actually do), I would blame their obnoxious intransigent refusal to upgrade to IPv6. That part wasn't the ISPs' idea, but it had nothing to do with the cost of address space and everything to do with shortighted laziness. They were, in fact, willing to pay for IPv4 space to avoid having to do anything.
Author is right about everything. Also: IPv6 doesn't fix this, it just introduces a new problem. IPv6 machines end up with local firewalls + stateful firewalls on the router. That router doesn't let in inbound cons. There is a part of UPnP that lets you add "pin holes" (it works like you expect) -- but the drawbacks are its kind of obscure, poorly implemented, and not guaranteed to be enabled.
The idea of router sounds simple and like it should implement some standard protocols. But in practice -- a lot of it is a mishmash of proprietary, ad hoc shitware. Something I never hear spoken about is the deep packet inspection filter component of the router firmware. It's a part of the router that decides on what traffic is allowed / not, and almost no company publishes this part. So you're not even in control of your own Internet traffic, tiny blobs of code written by some company get to decide if something is allowed or not.
If that sounds sus AF and kind of a bad idea -- well, it is. You can always run 100% open software with open-wrt. But the thing is -- the Internet isn't just your part of it. It's a network of networks, and all those shitty routers, with all that shitty firmware, is deeply ingrained within the entire Internet. That's millions of devices that would need to be replaced to fix the issue.
What consumer routers implement DPI in their default firmware? What type of traffic are you claiming they are dropping?
I've never heard of a claim like this, so I'm really curious. Note that I'm not talking about the huge DPI market for corporate/state networks.
Related comment from another thread
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49454785
> Even more ironic is that NAT got normalized as a security feature — “your devices are hidden!” — which is one of the things that made people resist the thing that would fix it.
That tracks. I briefly looked into the Tailscale website and I thought maybe I was wrong, maybe it's not a NAT/ddns toolchain, maybe it's something more complex that I'm too dumb to understand. But if my thesis that it's NATware is right, it makes sense to market it as a security product, it fooled me for one, but it also passes as a quality product for an organization, and they feel they are getting a security product when they are actually signing the purchase request of a developer that is applying networking techniques they learned from managing a videogame server.
I'm having trouble decoding this but Tailscale is a VPN that can traverse NAT when necessary. Arguably Tailscale wouldn't be needed if NAT didn't exist but considering the timeline I'm not going to declare a conflict of interest.
You are describing the product technically, but I find how it is used more important. Do you use it? What do you use it for? If empirically most users use it to host a server on a machine with firewalled IP, then that's more descriptive than its technical featureset as listed on the tin.
I've been running a home server and Tailscale is magic. My firewalls have no open ports. The tailnet is a virtual network that assigns IP addresses to approved devices that you authenticate to join.
I use it in 3 ways:
1. My phone connects to my home network by joining the tailnet. I can play music and movies from my home server when I am away. No struggles with configuration. 2. A dedicated mini pc at home is on a smart plug. I keep it powered off mostly. I can turn the plug on remotely and power the mini pc. It runs "tailscale --advertise-routes" which then exposes every device at my house to the tailnet. No open ports, but suddenly my phone thinks that it is back at home with all my home PCs. 3. I take my laptop with me and use "tailscale serve" which serves as a pipe. I can pipe my home movies to a smart TV at your house. Just install the jellyfin app, and browse for servers, and my server in my house appears in the list at your house.
i personally have used it
* to provide access to my home network, as though i am on the home network, while outside of said network
* to connect several locations to the same business network
the first lets me provide locally hosted services without exposing them to the internet, by allowing members of the VPN ("tailnet" in their parlance) to connect to those services
the second was very handy to move a few users from a company in the process of shutting down to their homes, so they could continue to work like they had in the company network once the actual internal company network was shut down.
Quite legitimate, a common use case of VPNs, an L3 encryption tunnel to provide virtual LAN access. It's kind of a hack usually, but it might work as a second redundant layer of security (the other usually being HTTPs, and in the case of there being no other layer of encryption that's where VPN wrapping is kind of a hacky solution).
The other common but completely distinct usecase of VPNs being residential usage to encrypt traffic and even more distinct, with the purpose of masking the true origin of a request.
In the former type of usage, which is the one you use, I think any VPN system would fulfill your purposes, of course you have to use something, but I'd venture a guess that you are using the generic features of tailscale, not its commercially distinguishing features. But they are still very on brand, generic or not.
fwiw, the author/founder seems to have made a career out of building post-hoc hacks in one layer to fix the shortcoming of other layers, to take memcached as an example. I don't think my thesis is novel, that these types of hacks are subpar when compared to solving the issue at the appropriate layer, it's part of the tradeoff of the technologies, but I'm just particulary opposed to any hack that allows server admins to skip the step where they get a dedicated IP address, I'm less opposed (but still) to other types of hacks.
I don't think any of us could know how most users use it.
The fact that it's a VPN is also pretty important, despite the utility of it also dealing with NAT headaches for you.
The main selling point is acting as a relatively efficient private overlay network, giving you a consistent private network even as devices move between different internet connections. (Something that NAT makes a bit harder but you don't get for free even if NAT isn't a factor)
I see it now, it's a bundle of both the practical and security aspects. I think the security aspects serve mostly as a marketing tool, potentially serving users who truly need a VPN.
But if I see a user that exposes a server without a dedicated IP address, and they use tailscale for this, the way I would describe it is that they are adding a third party node that routes traffic for them (just to provide multiplexing), so in terms of security, it's an additional unnecessary man in the middle. It's a testament to the marketing team that they are able to sell it as 'added security'. It's hard to know exactly how such open infra technologies are used, but I get the feeling that a good part of the customer base is buying tailscale to patch up a bad infra decision, while being (self) deluded into thinking that their system is very bleeding edge and secure.
Props to tailscale actually, lots to learn here, the lesson is to let the client save face and sell your tech not as something that fixes an embarassing mistake, but as something that's a bit opaque, high tech and implements security protocols, even if performatively.
Bonus points if there is upsell or onramp into actually sound technologies, like eventually you have to drop the whole tailscale thing and help the client actually get an IP address right? Or maybe even onboard the rogue ddnsed service onto the organization's existing ASN. It's a hard sell because the best solution in that case actually removes the product from the organization altogether, but I can imagine ways were the product stays in a non-central, QA-like sidechannel.
> But if I see a user that exposes a server without a dedicated IP address, and they use tailscale for this, the way I would describe it is that they are adding a third party node that routes traffic for them (just to provide multiplexing), so in terms of security, it's an additional unnecessary man in the middle.
If you are listening on a public IP, you can trivially be attacked by anyone on the Internet.
If you listen on a private IP that only Tailscale can reach directly, you can only be attacked by Tailscale itself, or by anyone who successfully infiltrated Tailscale's network.
Should you run plaintext protocols over Tailscale? Absolutely not. But you're going to receive orders of magnitude less malicious traffic on a server accessible only over Tailscale compared to a server listening on the public Internet.
This use case you have in mind where someone has a fixed server and uses tailscale to patch over the lack of IP, I think is a very rare use case.
I'm using tailscale to tunnel from an hetzner vm to my home, so that the vm can use my home connection for certain traffic. Traverses NAT and GNAT.
It just works: connect devices and they immediately show up in their portal. Most config is just clicking, but more advanced things can be configured as well. Definitely feels like a high quality product, not just something thrown together by a developer that learned a few network techniques.
>"that the vm can use my home connection for certain traffic. "
Huh. Why are you doing this, is the datacenter IP being (rightfully) blocked by some service to avoid abuse? Is your usecase breaking some services ToS?
Certainly adding more fire to the "never a GOOD reason to use this" thesis
> Certainly
So you make up reasons to be judgemental and then insist they're right?
It's practical to block entire datacenters. It's not so "right" that working around it becomes "wrong". If whatever the server's doing can fit through a single home connection then it's probably fine.
I'll give you a concrete use case: A few times a month I want to wget a file on imgur to my server. That's a valid action miles away from any kind of abuse, but the IP range is blocked so I use my desktop to do it. If I routed it over tailscale instead that would be equally valid.
I'm still not convinced that IPv6 is a good thing. I think that we should have doubled down on sharing IP addresses. Both for consumbers (NAT) and for servers (NAT, TLS/HTTP reverse-proxying). It just solves all problems with IP address exhaustion. And the fact that consumers can't just directly connect to each other is a feature.
IPv6, in a way, takes the concept of a MAC address and puts it on steroids. This became evident to me when I learned about EUI-64 addresses. And then my brain melted when I learned that any interface can be assigned an arbitrary number of unique addresses with varying purposes or contexts because the address space is truly *that big*.
When I consider that quality of IPv6’s design, it communicates to me an old and ideal vision of what we thought the internet would and should be - a hyper-connected, shared infrastructure where [Layer 3] identity is universally unique such that connectivity between any two arbitrary nodes is possible (which obviously isn’t true for NAT w/ overload).
I’m just a lowly SysAdmin who finally decided to get his CCNA - so I’m a nobody - but as I worked through the material I felt like I was paging through a history book or biography of how the Internet’s life came to be and all the mistakes made along the way. Most features felt like patches for design considerations that were overlooked. Examples: DHCP Snooping, STP’s various * Guards, and the mere fact that Layer 2 and Layer 3 addresses are distinct concepts.
I don’t think there’s any disagreement that NAT was co-opted as a security feature. I never hear that said in a positive way, either. I think if we were to start over, with IPv6 as the default assumption, the tools we’d develop for network security would look very different, but not at all impossible or any more difficult.
But again - I’m a nobody. Just thinking out loud here.
Having actual unique stable IPv6 addresses for every device is the dream of every Ad vendor - no need to bother with the huge array of tracking techniques and the chicken and mouse game of fighting various tracking protection solutions, just log the stable IPv6 of the user's device across any service they use.
So, of course, we then got Privacy Addresses, or whatever the name is. Which now means that you don't actually have a stable unique public IP, it actually changes all the time, and legitimate tracking and logging of your own network activity actually becomes much more complicated on IPv6.
The 'why' behind all of these protocols and decisions is left out in favor of the cert exams. Being able to implement is usually what gets you paid.
>mere fact that Layer 2 and Layer 3 addresses are distinct concepts.
The logical separation between the ideas allows for a lot of flexibility, and there were some wrong answers on how scalable vs flexible things should be.
Ethernet and IP beat the shit out of everything else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars
They emerged with a decent answer: L2 crosses intranetwork, L3 crosses internetwork. Their separation allows L3 addressing to be completely unaware of multiple changing L2 (lower level) intranetwork switches, which is immensely useful.
Trying to solve everything with One Master Protocol to solve it all turned out like this: https://xkcd.com/927/
this works nicely in IPV6, where true seperation of layer 2 and layer 3 exist.
This does not exist in practice in ethernet, because ARP is required as a mechanism to learn MAC IP bindings and is dependant on IP AND Ethernet.
IPv6 solves this by doing neighbour discovery on link local addresses and multicast addresses.
> the mere fact that Layer 2 and Layer 3 addresses are distinct concepts.
If it weren't you couldn't have the same IP over several interfaces.
When I want to debug reachability concerns, it's a shame that I can only use ping/traceroute between the non-NAT peers, and then have to SSH to my reverse proxy to do yet another ping to the backend. Similar for tcpdump.
This is the cost to splitting your routing between layer 3 and 4.
I'm now IPv6 everywhere, and so I get to just use ping. Much simpler.
Further, protecting IPv6 services is simpler, because I can terminate (m)TLS on the backend. With a reverse proxy on another host, I have to have yet another means of securing the proxy-backend path. Yet more complexity!
> And the fact that consumers can't just directly connect to each other is a feature.
Consumers should be protected by firewalls. That's independent of routing.
Easier just to say it's a thing, like a force of nature.
New network growth (mobile, Africa, Asia) uses it, old growth stays on v4 and will eventually roll over. People with address space usually don't need much more, but the IPv6 space better reflects how connected the world is - we're gonna need a bigger address space than v4, that's for sure.
New protocols shipped quickly on rough consensus and working code and weren't perfect - some left all kinds of undefined behavior, or lacked clear advantages over predecessors and competing protocols.
P2P communication is also a feature, which an entire class of applications would love to make use of. Instead, we need to spawn (and PAY for) TURN and STUN servers
Reverse proxies work because they're not behind restrictive NATs, and having a few central servers that are not behind Symmetric NAT is a surefire way to establish an ISP-granted monopoly. Even if that somehow worked, this completely breaks P2P for consumers (which I think you intend) as well as torrenting without, again, a central NAT-punching TURN-like server. So yeah, address exhaustion is done but so is the Internet as we know it.
ipv6 is a window for every buttock. I don't see this as a good thing.