It's likewise a bit silly that we had to add TLS support to Tailscale: https://tailscale.com/blog/tls-certs/
But we want to interoperate well with the clients people already have (browsers, their system ssh client, etc...)
> However, if your service doesn’t have a valid TLS certificate, despite the fact that your connection is encrypted using Tailscale, your browser will warn you that the connection is not secure (it’s doing the right thing—it doesn’t know about Tailscale!). So, to avoid confusing your users, you might want to provision a TLS certificate to validate your internal services.
Browser warnings and user confusion aren’t the only consequence of not using HTTPS. The more concrete impact is that you lose access to a large and growing number of web APIs that are restricted to secure contexts.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Secure...
echo "alias telnet=nc -v" >> ~/.zshrc && source ~/.zshrcFor the rest: brew install telnet
sudo port install inetutilsThis is unsurprising, because it is used for different purposes in different layers of the stack. It is not at all a black and white state of "encrypted" vs. "not encrypted".
For example, in one organiztion I've worked with, Wireguard (generally, including Tailscale) is approved for restricting connections only to authorized network devices/users and that data maintains integrity in transit, but is not approved for protecting the confidentiality of sensitive information. Connections which access specific resources are required to be encrypted at the application level using a mechanism which has been approved for that information type (given a specific threat model).
So you could transmit very small amounts of data over TCP/IP, over a Tailscale network, using a set of pre-shared, one-time pads. And you might actually want to do this! It's really not ridiculous, but you do need to assess whether you really do have a threat model that needs it.
The problem is that rsh is very stale and unmaintained - even those versions that have had releases in recent years (e.g. GNU Inetutils) are very old inside - even if they've kept up with patches, they have not kept up with features e.g. modern user session construction.
It also turns out that ssh the client, much more so than ssh the protocol, is really a key integration point and API that users end up needing. It has a broad feature set that turns up in use cases all over, many of which rsh does not handle.