SSH vs. OpenVPN for Tunneling | Hacker News Reader

SSH vs. OpenVPN for Tunneling

blog.backslasher.net

363 pointssetra110 comments

I used to maintain an ipsec VPN for road warrior type scenarios, but I've found that mostly I just wanted to get a remote desktop on a computer within the network.

So I've stopped mucking around with VPN and just published Apache Guacamole HTML5 VNC/RDP tunnels. No plugins, no clients except a modern web browser and good security with certbot+auto redirect to https+simple auth to keep badguys away from possible exploits in the guacamole login form. Configs can be as simple as the NoAuth plugin, all the way to full integration with eg. AD. I've implemented this at a number of businesses, and it does what almost everyone in the organization wants. It also supports things like printing (to a pdf that comes thru the browser as a download) and file transfer. Super easy to set up and is much more responsive than VNC or RDP thru ssh.

The times when I actually want full IP access to a network from my laptop are so rare that it seemed silly to maintain IPSec.

What need do others have for full-connectivity VPNs? Not site-to-site VPNs of course, but these ad-hoc on the road type ones.

Honest question

> It also supports things like printing (to a pdf that comes thru the browser as a download)

Wow, didn't know that. Impressive!

I VPN back to my home network when I’m abroad so I can watch US Netflix shows.

Curious but why?

Because he likes watching US Netflix shows.

Shows available on Netflix depend on location.

Being local in a country with a limited Flix library, I have a hard time still paying for the (most excellent!) service.

And since Flix has succesfully banned all commercial VPN's, I am more and more contemplating seting up a "share your own local IP for Flix affectionados" with a couple of people.

How do others solve / done / consider this?

Problem is they not only banned most commercial VPNs but i believe they pretty much banned entire ASN's from watching their stuff. So it's not like you can just go ahead and and set a VPS up somewhere, because it'll be blocked too :(

I recently wrote about my home VPN setup in a previous HN thread [1]. But to answer your question, the additional use-cases I have are:

1. I connect to my home file server from all of my devices. This allows me to access my singular master file system from everywhere, which includes all of my documents and data. For example, I can reach my Keepass database from all devices without any need for clumsy synchronization or a third-party "cloud" provider.

2. I view my security camera streams by reaching my on-premises NVR from anywhere.

3. I can print to home from anywhere.

4. My entire media library is available from anywhere.

5. I can reach my family's home intranet web-app from all of my devices (e.g., my phone), natively.

It's true that all of this could be done in a remote desktop window, but it would be less smooth and less convenient. E.g., using Keepass in a remote desktop window wouldn't be as convenient as running it locally (with the kdbx loaded from the file server).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15586997

What's your upstream speed at home?

I have pretty much the same functionality, including the printing, plus I have a home IoT setup.

Through the MQTT app on my phone I can view and control the home heating, see the output from various sensors (like house temp and outside temp) and control some of the lights - all without having to send my data to a commercial product's cloud service to manage things.

The IoT hub is an Atom-based Mini ITX machine running Ubuntu server, Mosquitto (MQTT message broker), Node-Red (MQTT message handler) and Home Assistant to manage some of the sensors and automation (although Node-Red does most of the work). I'll probably move the whole lot to a Raspberry Pi at some time.

This setup is more of a base to exercise my electronics hobby skills than a serious attempt to automate everything - for example, the home heating IoT stuff overlays (rather than replaces) the traditional electronic timer and temperature sensors on the heating/hot water system, so if the IoT cleverness goes offline, watchdog relays will return control to the old timer/sensors.

VPN access is through a Draytek xDSL Router (2860) - they have good inbuilt VPN support.

What protocol do you use to access your Keepass database from your mobile device?

Are you always connected to your VPN on your mobile device? How much network traffic overhead does it add?

Plus, what's the performance impact on your smartphone? Battery life, available resources.

I've been using syncthing for my keepass file and media sync. Love it.

For everyone else, I recommend https://pritunl.com or https://www.zerotier.com to get VPN access easily. Pritunl is more traditional client/server while ZeroTier creates 1 giant LAN between as many machines as you want.

Thank you for mentioning them!!! Was just looking for a solution for connecting my VPSs across DO, Vultr and Lightsale ZeroTier looks like a perfect solution

ZeroTier is the perfect solution, it's the most genious VPN solution i've seen.

http://packetpushers.net/podcast/podcasts/pq-134-meet-zeroti... <- Here's a Pod with the creator of ZT, once you've listened to it you'll realize how it fits everyone =)

1. My country bans a lot of websites, so I'm often using netherlands VPN to circumvent this ban. Also internet provider at my work sends angry emails when I'm downloading torrents, so I'm downloading them over VPN as well. I don't really see any alternative to VPN.

2. My home server contains some interesting services for me (file storage, movies, music, passwords), but I don't want to expose them to the internet, so I exposed it to VPN and protected with very minimal authorization (nginx checking value of specific cookie acting as a password). So I'm using VPN as a main protection for weakly protected services.

3. I didn't implement it yet, but I want to receive my mail on my home server. Currently mail server operates on VPN server, so I can't really be sure that nobody reads my mail. But operating e-mail requires static IP and reverse-ptr record which isn't available from my home internet provider. So I want to use some kind of port mapping with VPN to transfer everything to my home server. Though ssh would work well here, but I would need to think about reconnecting if network is down, I expect VPN to be more stable.

Ssh to access various servers/git repos/my desktop. Ssh in a local window is always snappy. Terminal access in a RDP/VNC window is not. Not to mention modifier key issues etc...

Guacamole also supports SSH/telnet, and is very snappy thru html5. I autogenerate a guac config file for all the switches on each site at work, and even on high-latency low-bandwith sites on wireless it still works great. Definitely better than a console session via RDP or VNC. This has the extra benefit that you can lock your switches down to only be managed thru certain IPs and enforce session recording.

Many companies (including startups) have internal tools that are web applications. While the more adventurous firms put these on public IPs behind an employee login/SSO system, the more conservative will always have them behind VPN. VNC is a drastically worse UX than a local browser unless your endpoints are really bad.

Honestly, I think you can get a similar security posture with a reverse proxy enforcing client certificates and 2FA (this is what my employer does), but people feel more comfortable trusting VPN appliances from big-name vendors than their nginx configs. Harder to fail open, certainly.

Wow a little googling on this subject led me to sshuttle, which I've never heard of before but looks awesome, will try it out on Monday:

http://sshuttle.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage.html

Basically "vpn over ssh" (not really, but close enough).

Ssh has builtin vpn.

In case you don't know, ssh has built-in VPN support which may be enough for lots of use cases.

Both of the comments about VPN support within SSH seem to be heavily downvoted with no reason why. As far as I can see, their points are correct:

> OpenSSH has built-in TUN/TAP support using -w<local-tun-number>:<remote-tun-number>. Here, a layer 3/point-to-point/ TUN tunnel is described. It is also possible to create a layer 2/ethernet/TAP tunnel.[0]

Just with invalid terminology (s/ssh/OpenSSH) and the likelihood of the added slowdown mentioned in the article.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VPN_over_SSH

This is one of those Arch wiki pages that I find lacking, so I personally always refer to the man pages:

man 1 ssh:

     -w local_tun[:remote_tun]
             Requests tunnel device forwarding with the specified tun(4)
             devices between the client (local_tun) and the server
             (remote_tun).

             The devices may be specified by numerical ID or the keyword
             ``any'', which uses the next available tunnel device.  If
             remote_tun is not specified, it defaults to ``any''.  See also
             the Tunnel and TunnelDevice directives in ssh_config(5).  If the
             Tunnel directive is unset, it is set to the default tunnel mode,
             which is ``point-to-point''.

man 5 ssh_config:

     Tunnel  Request tun(4) device forwarding between the client and the
             server.  The argument must be yes, point-to-point (layer 3),
             ethernet (layer 2), or no (the default).  Specifying yes requests
             the default tunnel mode, which is point-to-point.

     TunnelDevice
             Specifies the tun(4) devices to open on the client (local_tun)
             and the server (remote_tun).

             The argument must be local_tun[:remote_tun].  The devices may be
             specified by numerical ID or the keyword any, which uses the next
             available tunnel device.  If remote_tun is not specified, it
             defaults to any.  The default is any:any.

man 5 sshd_config:

     PermitTunnel
             Specifies whether tun(4) device forwarding is allowed.  The argu-
             ment must be yes, point-to-point (layer 3), ethernet (layer 2),
             or no.  Specifying yes permits both point-to-point and ethernet.
             The default is no.

             Independent of this setting, the permissions of the selected
             tun(4) device must allow access to the user.

Doesn't support UDP on macOS though.

It doesn't support UDP in general AFAIK, i'm a frequent user of shuttle and find it indispensable, but if you need UDP it does fail, but then most VPN protocols only support a subset of IP layer protocols, e.g multicast doesn't generally work on any of them.

sshuttle is basically magic to me. Wherever someone with no idea about their threat model has deployed firewalls (ala every major business I've ever worked at) sshuttle is usually the key to being productive for me.

The stuff magic to me is the tools that speak both HTTPS + SSH or some other protocol, showing some normal site to anyone but those in the know.

I've never had to use them since as you say few are that hardcore in their lockdowns, but it's nice to know they exist.

I use SSLH for my poor man's VPN, I use redsocks but I guess I could use sshuttle. SSLH is really nice, easy to setup, easy on your resources.

I use sshuttle frequently, usually as a quick censorship bypass tool for specific sites.

sshuttle also claims to have avoided the "TCP over TCP" problem.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41427123/how-does-sshutt...

What's the difference between that and https://github.com/darkk/redsocks ?

Edit: why the downvote? I thought I asked a legit question...?

You can skip sshuttle's magic and do exactly the same thing manually with "ssh -D" + "iptables -j REDIRECT" + redsocks, but that's a lot moving parts.

From the HN guidelines:

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

If you pass --dns it tunnels that as well.

Handy when you want to do something private on a machine you don't have a VPN setup on.

"Wow a little googling on this subject led me to sshuttle, which I've never heard of before but looks awesome"

sshuttle is indeed awesome - a viable VPN that requires nothing on the endpoint but a functioning ssh login (and python on the remote host).

So any host, anywhere, with no configuration (and no permission required by the operators) that you can ssh into ... is now a VPN endpoint for you.

Sibling comments in this thread are pointing out that ssh has this functionality already and that is true, but some configuration and maintenance (and understanding) is required. Not so with sshuttle.

ALSO:

We (rsync.net) sponsored the reworking of the ipfw target for sshuttle so that it now works properly on FreeBSD with the --dns option, etc. We also sponsored proper UDP tunneling for sshuttle on FreeBSD but I am not sure those patches are in a -release version of FreeBSD yet ...

You need to use FreeBSD 11.0 (not 11.1) and you need to:

  git clone https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle.git
  cd sshuttle  ;  git checkout c746d6f7db3efbad6caddea76bdf916c46cf5c6e

... and that will get you a working sshuttle on FreeBSD with --dns support.

i came to this thread to recommend sshuttle. it's indispensable and very well-performing, imo.

I hadn't heard of it before, but it is beyond cool. I just installed it, ran the command, reconnected to my network and now it works. Amazing!

Wow, this does look amazing!

A shame it's a bit more involved to get working with Windows, it's a pain to have to start a Linux VM to be able to use it :(

If you use Windows and need to access in a browser some web services over ssh, then just run ssh -D and configure your browser to use PAC JavaScript file that redirects relevant host names to the ssh proxy.

This is almost what I do today, only difference is that I use a proxy switcher plugin in Firefox, rather than using a PAC file.

What about using cygwin instead of a Linux VM? I didn't have the time to try specifically this, bit normally you can reach really far with Cygwin. Plus, no need for root access, and the installation is natively "portable" (everything sits inside a single directory).

I mention this every time VPNs come up... It's just so much better than any of the other VPN clients if you are only interested in TCP, I've been using it for over 6 years.

The key difference between it and VPN protocols for anyone trying to compare is: TCP only, and TCP decompile/recompile with SSH in the middle. This has many advantages: speed (TCP over TCP is megga sucky obviously), server setup (basically none, you just need non-root access to an ssh server with python).

It really is as simple as making an SSH connection on the command line and you can route all your TCP traffic immediately.

It also has some really nice fine grained subnet routing features... On some strange occasions when I have needed it i have merged multiple remote subnets into the same virtual one one my machine by selecting ranges. It also has an auto discovery feature built in if you just want to route the specific IPs that exist on the other side.

sshuttle is also in a number of package managers now, it's in apt at least.

Its great, but. It won't work on unrooted Android devices, and I doubt it will work on unrooted iOS devices. Not sure about ChromeOS.

sshuttle hasn't had an actual release in 5 years according to the github project.

If you're using a windows client I recommend bitvise tunnelier.

I suspect you are looking at the original repo. It has since been forked and has a few contributors now https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle

I've found that sshuttle with the --dns option still leaks dns queries occasionally so I set my web browser and curl to use SOCKS and run sshuttle to try to catch anything else.

This has been known forever. Stream-based packet tunneling absolutely does outperform packet wrapping in good network conditions, for the simple reason that small packets can be combined by the transport layer and avoid the overhead.

The problem is that in the presence of any packet loss at all, every packet lost causes a stall of the whole tunnel until it gets retransmitted, which even in the best case recovery conditions requires two (three? I forget my SACK details) round trips. If one side is using traditional TCP retransmit timers it can be much, much longer.

Well-known unpredictable TCP-over-TCP performance would only explain OpenVPN/TCP results.

But OP has posed also OpenVPN/UDP performance that is 2x...3x slower than SSH port forwarding, so I'd guess there is more to this story (see also andmarios's impromtu test results above).

Your downside I don't think applies in this case. Because it's a single application wanting to make a single reliable connection. So if there was any packet loss at all it would have to stall the whole connection anyways regardless of whether it's wrapped in SSH, OpenVPN, or nothing.

I've been using a VPN over TCP ssh for a year. The end point is across the world. I get excellent bandwidth and no stalls. Latency is less than anticipated. The thoretical arguments against TCP/TCP do not match my experience.

Yeah, real world network paths, especially inter-data-center ones, generally do operate at exactly zero packet loss. Until they don't, alas.

`ip link set qlen 1000 dev tun0` (so it matches the eth0 queue, instead of being an order of magnitude smaller) on both ends of the tunnel, and you get 90% of direct connection speed from openvpn:

  $ iperf3 -c 10.1.0.2
  Connecting to host 10.1.0.2, port 5201
  [  4] local 10.1.0.1 port 38274 connected to 10.1.0.2 port 5201
  [ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr  Cwnd
  [  4]   0.00-1.00   sec  3.12 MBytes  26.1 Mbits/sec    0    802 KBytes
  [  4]   1.00-2.00   sec  22.3 MBytes   187 Mbits/sec    0   2.24 MBytes
  [  4]   2.00-3.00   sec  21.4 MBytes   179 Mbits/sec    0   2.45 MBytes
  [  4]   3.00-4.00   sec  23.3 MBytes   196 Mbits/sec    0   2.39 MBytes
  [  4]   4.00-5.00   sec  23.4 MBytes   196 Mbits/sec    0   2.58 MBytes
  [  4]   5.00-6.00   sec  21.5 MBytes   180 Mbits/sec    0   2.70 MBytes
  [  4]   6.00-7.00   sec  23.5 MBytes   197 Mbits/sec    0   2.68 MBytes
  [  4]   7.00-8.00   sec  22.6 MBytes   189 Mbits/sec    0   2.78 MBytes
  [  4]   8.00-9.00   sec  22.4 MBytes   188 Mbits/sec    0   2.45 MBytes
  [  4]   9.00-10.00  sec  23.5 MBytes   197 Mbits/sec    0   2.69 MBytes
  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
  [ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr
  [  4]   0.00-10.00  sec   207 MBytes   174 Mbits/sec    0             sender
  [  4]   0.00-10.00  sec   207 MBytes   174 Mbits/sec                  receiver

  iperf Done.

Using SSH Tunnels is not TCP over TCP.

You have a TCP connection between local app and SSH client, then a second TCP connection between SSH client and SSH server, and a third TCP connection between SSH server and remote app.

There is no TCP over TCP when you use SSH tunnels. Lost packets between SSH client and SSH server do not cause retransmits on either application side.

That's what I thought too, that there is just a byte stream being tunneled between SSH server and client and not a TCP packet stream.

Btw I use unix sockets on client and server to avoid the local connection TCP overhead.

There should be some catch in the setup. Maybe the CPUs he used are old and don't support hardware AES acceleration?

I just run iperf3 over OpenVPN / UDP with AES-256-GCM between two servers in the same DC (but different rooms, through their public network, 1gE links) and got an average of 750MBits/sec. I don't have any special setting.

Out of curiosity -- what's your SSH tunneling rate in the same setup?

Just tested. Ssh has indeed better performance, at around 870Mbit/sec.

But the gap in my -anecdotal- testing is much smaller than OP's and maybe predictable due to the differences (as OP described) on how OpenVPN and ssh work.

It’s really not an apples to apples comparison. For my teammates on the development team, yes an SSH tunnel is going to be easier for our needs due to the reduced overhead. But if I want to give my customer support team access to private web services in our production cluster, a VPN is the perfect solution.

At FarmLogs, each of our Kube clusters has a bastion VPN host that puts you inside the VPC and handles DNS to Route53 (and the VPC) so <service>.farmlogs “just works”

We use Foxpass to handle this with LDAP bridged to Google Apps so when an employee joins or leaves their VPN access is immediately updated.

A huge advantage of vpn tunnels is that they stay up indefinitely. I've had openvpn links stay up for months. With ssh, you're lucky to get a few days. I've tried scripts and even autossh, and ssh has never been as reliable as openvpn or tinc.

Does anyone have any experience with ipop/groupvpn[0]? It seems like an interesting alternative to tinc in that it can do turn/stun using libjingle to bust nat. I'm not clear on how well tested or secure it is though.

[0] http://ipop-project.org/

Now I wonder if there's a way to combine mosh's automatic reconnecting with ssh tunneling somehow...

That's latency related. Mosh uses UDP only, sshuttle uses TCP only.

AutoSSH plus some firewall scripts to ensure data only travels through the VPN would suffice.

I found that OpenVPN benefited greatly from setting larger tunnel MTUs and then allowing the IP packets to be fragmented. I think it's encrypting per-packet which is somewhat inefficient.

A very intelligent write up with one small, possibly fatal flaw.

When you are comparing one thing to another and writing up your pearls of wisdom for the masses you need to control every variable (within reason).

I can't see a LAN based test acting as a baseline.

> you need to control every variable

Why? I plunk down a lot of stuff on my blog, not everything is up to that pretty high standard you mention.

One thing I hate about OpenVPN is the ridiculous configuration. I'm a big fan of tinc[0] personally, although you have to use 1.1pre releases to get half decent encryption, it's configuration is wonderful.

[0] https://www.tinc-vpn.org/

tinc 1.1pre seems pretty good, but I do worry about the legacy fallback for encryption; There doesn't seem to be any way to e.g. --force-experimental to prevent encryption falling back to the old RSA mode.

SSH tunnel as proxy is easier and simpler to use if you have a VPS.

Setup the tunnel: ssh -D 8080 vv@xx.xx.xx.xxx

Change your system proxy settings: Socks proxy, 127.0.0.1, 8080

Done!

Yup, even works using putty.exe on Windows (http://www.foxhop.net/ssh-tunnel)

And with PAC JavaScript files one can redirect only specific hosts to ssh or redirect to different ssh connections.

[Zerotier](https://zerotier.com) is far nicer than all of them, clients (Win, macOS, GNU\Linux, OpenWrt, iOS, Android, NAS) are open-source and the hosted service allows up to 100 devices on one of unlimited networks for free. Because it emulates the ethernet layer, there is no client side configuration required and it can be used for non-IP packets (ex. DHCP). By enabling the default route permission on the client it can also be used as a gateway to the internet through a remote host on the network. All communications are e2e AES-256 with certificate-based access for private networks. Oh, and they also run a public earth network with unlimited members billed as "the global LAN party." It's a really convenient service, and the performance is good enough to be used between private clouds.

> non-IP packets (ex. DHCP)

DHCP is IP/UDP.

True, I was thinking of NetBUEI/IPX/AppleTalk/etc.

I'm really tempted to use this, but I'm a little nervous about relying on a company for this, especially because it doesn't look like they should be profitable on their current offerings.

Correct me if wrong, but I think that aside from their web based portal, everything else is open source. So you could control everything via API.

So if they ever did go out of business, you could host it yourself and I'm sure by then an open source web portal would emerge to take the main site's place. (Not to mention that they'd probably just release the web app if they were going out of business).

Hope it never comes to that though, I'd imagine their main bread and butter would be larger enterprise licenses.

The good thing is that if they were to go out of business, you wouldn't have made any technical investment since you just plug in the IPs to your applications and go.

1. Doesn't look like there were runs of iperf over UDP and TCP, with simulated buffer sizes, so hard to know what the network connection is even capable of.

2. Also, how reliable is the network connection? Maybe it fluctuates every minute in usable bandwidth due to congestion or jitter. VMs are subject to noisy neighbor issues.

3. It looks like the ciphers are different, which could of course affect throughput greatly if one is not hardware accelerated or if its CPU bound. Worth checking CPU and other system resource usage for differences.

4. You could try OpenVPN with encryption and/or compression disabled entirely in UDP mode for best possible performance IIRC. This, at least, you would expect to beat an SSH tunnel.

  > 2. It looks like the cipher "AWS128-CTR" is being used for
  > SSH, I'm not even sure what that is. I'd look at CPU and 
  > other system resource usage for differences.

My guess is just a typo, for AES128-CTR.

Regarding 4, sort of defeats the purpose of using OpenVPN no?

Port forwarding terminates TCP in the middle, it is supposed to be faster no matter what, no?

Worth looking at ZeroTier (commercial - actually running a hardware IndieGoGo right now) and WireGuard (IPSec - 'The Next Generation' / 'Voyager' or whichever you thought was best) as modern options.

We love ZeroTier. It's a great piece of software that makes layer 2 networking (and above) across WANs very simple and secure.

I like that Wireguard is slowly sneaking into common use. Its performance seems promising. https://www.wireguard.com/performance/

I believe it is headed for Linux kernel mainline soon-ish.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15596963

If you are a road warrior (or you want to bypass security filters at work) you can securely proxy Firefox web and DNS traffic over a VPN using just SSH.

All you need is an SSH server running at home or in the "cloud".

I documented this a few years back:

http://www.foxhop.net/ssh-tunnel

This is also a great way to access resources on the remote network, for example your router/modem setup page or Jenkins, or whatever else is running on that remote Network.

spiped would also be interesting to compare. Ridiculously easy to set up, and made by cperciva.

Didn't see any mention of MTU in the post. If the defaults were sub-optimal for OpenVPN, that alone would account for the reduced throughput.

I recently had to set up a 3 computer SSH tunnel and wrote about it, maybe people will find it interesting:

https://vadosware.io/post/ssh-tunneling-using-an-intermediar...

I first tried to setup OpenVPN and only wanted to use the the SSH tunnel for DNS purposes (I couldn't use normal DDNS tools), but in the end, I ended up running a SOCKS proxy over the tunnel and it was stunningly effective, enough that watching Netflix despite intercontinental round trips.

Any love for Softether vpn here? I use it every day to connect gome and it just woeks. Always. It encapsulates ssh I think

>"As long as you only need one TCP port forwarded, SSH is a much faster choice, because it has less overhead than SSH."

OpenVPN is way more robust solution for tunneling though.

I've found that UDP tunnels work sometimes better in when there is considerable packet loss and high latency (poor radio links).

IPSec on Linux has better performance than OpenVPN due to multi core support. That said setting up VPN tends to be time consuming and error prone. But what if the ssh connection drops, what restarts the tunnel then? IPSec has restart mechanism for when the net drops which it will do.

I use both actually, where the best tool is applicable.

Some commenters have mentioned StrongSwan (or OpenSwan which is more known to me).

I've actually seen OpenSwan perform better than Cisco VPN tunnels. And I love pointing that out to our networking guys since we pay nothing for OpenSwan.

What's the fastest option when you do need UDP?

Generally I just use SSH, but for gaming i've resorted to 160bit OpenVPN.

Incidentally setting up a OpenVPN server on dd-wrt is a rather hellish experience.

The overhead of layer 2/3 packet headers in OpenVPN did not cause such a huge slowdown, its much more likely that OpenVPN was operating in TCP mode, and thus subject to the tcp-in-tcp[1] problem with tunnel internal tcp sessions. Even an extraordinarily slow machine by modern standards can manage 100mbit openVPN without much of an issue.

EDIT: did not see UDP results. There is still something else going on here, thats still much too slow for openVPN (without tweaking).

[1] http://sites.inka.de/bigred/devel/tcp-tcp.html

Reading TFA both TCP and UDP OpenVPN modes were tested. UDP was about three times faster than TCP, but SSH was three times faster than that.

Possibly the SSH encryption could have been more optimal for their use case?

There is a very simple test: fast.com. I tried fast.com over sshuttle and OpenVPN and OpenVPN was faster while sshuttle kind of collapsed.

I wonder why nobody has mentioned StrongSwan (IPSec+IKEv2) or ShadowSocks, which are both performant and very secure.

Shadowsocks is not very secure at all. Static keys and naive crypto. But that doesn't matter much since its primary use is for obfuscation.

I would love to read more about Shadowsocks security, if you have a link.

How do you redirect DNS over SSH though?

iirc man ssh has some info on ssh virtual private network

IIRC that suffers from the TCP-through-TCP performance issue?

Sshuttle [1] takes care of that see --dns and --help and the documentation. You might also wanna disable IPv6 --disable-ipv6

Its basically a script which takes care of ssh, the routing, and firewalling. Its crossplatform, should work on Windows/Linux/macOS and perhaps more.

[1] https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle

[2] https://sshuttle.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Just a clarification ...

https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle is the original, now abandoned, sshuttle. Development was taken over by:

https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle

... which is the current, maintained version that you should track.

A SOCKS5 tunnel supports DNS. This is good for web browsing and is natively supported by ssh. You can even use it for individual programs using the tsocks command line wrapper.

They're different beasts with different use-cases.

I rely on both, and like having both options around.

I use https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle but it's often too slow. I am wonder if their exist any go/rust equivalent of this project.

Cool Keep it up.

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