You manage a PKI and have to distribute the keys yourself, no auth/login etc.
it's much better than wireguard, not requiring O(N) config changes to add a node, and allowing peoxy nodes etc.
iirc key revocation and so on are not easy.
The main company working on it now seems to be adding all the fancy easy-to-use features as a layer on top of Nebula that they are selling. I personally appreciate getting to use the simple core of Nebula as open source. It seems very Unix-y to me: a simple tool that does one thing and does it well.
O(n) is only required for:
- active revocation of a certificate (requires adding the CA fingerprint to the config file)
- adding/removing a lighthouses (hub for publishing IPs for p2p) or relay (for going over p2p)
- CA rotation
I made a shell script that does most of that for my needs.
Edit, since I can't reply sadly:
You're right, that was a bad example.
I can probably list at least a few dozen things that all require certificates though, which was really my point. Everything has dependencies.
Also if you just... Don't trust big tech, run your own CA.