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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

What's the advantage of this relatively obscure tool compared to something standard like wireguard or stunnel?

* The tool is not obscure, it's packaged in most distributions.[1][2][3] It was written and maintained by Colin Percival, aka "the tarnsnap guy" or "the guy who invented scrypt". He is the security officer for FreeBSD.

* spiped can be used transparently by just putting a "ProxyCommand" in your ssh_config. This means you can connect to a server just by using "ssh", normally. (as opposed to wireguard where you need to always be on your VPN, otherwise connnect to your VPN manually before running ssh)

* As opposed to wireguard which runs in the kernel, spiped can easily be set-up to run as a user, and be fully hardened by using the correct systemd .service configuration [4]

* The protocol is much more lightweight than TLS (used by stunnel), it's just AES, padded to 1024 bytes with a 32 bit checksum. [5]

* The private key is much easier to set up than stunnel's TLS certificate, "dd if=/dev/urandom count=4 bs=1k of=key" and you're good to go.

[1] https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/spiped

[2] https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/spiped/

[3] https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/spiped/

[4] https://ruderich.org/simon/notes/systemd-service-hardening

[5] https://github.com/Tarsnap/spiped/blob/master/DESIGN.md

Correction: I was the security officer for FreeBSD... about a dozen years ago. I'm now the release engineering lead.

Wireguard can also run in userspace (e.g. boringtun[0], wireguard-go[1], Tailscale).

[0] https://github.com/cloudflare/boringtun

[1] https://git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-go/about/

> The private key is much easier to set up than stunnel's TLS certificate, "dd if=/dev/urandom count=4 bs=1k of=key" and you're good to go.

The spiped documentation recommends a key size with a minimum of 256b of entropy. I'm curious why you've chosen such a large key size (4096b) here? Is there anything to suggest 256b is no longer sufficient for the general case?

Force of habit. No particular reason, "4kiB feels like a nice number", cargo culting. Choose one :) .

It doesn't matter if you have more than 256 bits, as your key file gets hashed with SHA256 at the end[1]. It could be 5GiB it would be the same. So yes, you're right to mention that more bits don't add more security.

[1] https://github.com/Tarsnap/spiped/blob/2194b2c64de65eed119ab...

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