Nebula VPN routes between hosts privately, flexibly, and efficiently

guest · Dec 12, 2019

Nebula VPN routes between hosts privately, flexibly, and efficiently
VPN mesh networks allow nearby nodes to rapidly communicate peer-to-peer
December 12, 2019
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/201...een-hosts-privately-flexibly-and-efficiently/

Last month, the engineering department at Slack—an instant messaging platform commonly used for community and small business organization—released a new distributed VPN mesh tool called Nebula. Nebula is free and open source software, available under the MIT license.

It's difficult to coherently explain Nebula in a nutshell. According to the people on Slack's engineering team, they asked themselves "what is the easiest way to securely connect tens of thousands of computers, hosted at multiple cloud service providers in dozens of locations around the globe?" And (developing) Nebula was the best answer they had.

Nebula-transmitted data is fully encrypted using the Noise protocol framework, which is also used in modern, highly security-focused projects such as Signal and WireGuard. Unlike more traditional VPN technologies—including WireGuard—Nebula automatically and dynamically discovers available routes between nodes and sends traffic down the most efficient path between any two nodes rather than forcing everything through a central distribution point.
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Getting started with Nebula isn't too difficult, although the documentation is a little sparse. The Github repository for Nebula makes binaries for Windows, Linux, and MacOS available, along with a sample configuration file.

We think that the greatest potential value to using Nebula over a more conventional VPN tool like WireGuard is its ability to discover the most efficient routes wherever it happens to be. If you have Nebula running on your laptop, your home PC, and a Digital Ocean droplet, the laptop will communicate with the PC at LAN speeds when it's at home and Internet speeds when it's on the road.
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Nebula: Introducing Nebula, the open source global overlay network from Slack

mirimir · Dec 12, 2019

Huh. I wonder whether one can route Nebula among Tor v3 onions.

guest · Dec 19, 2019

How to set up your own Nebula mesh VPN, step by step
Itching to get your own Nebula mesh VPN up and running? We've got you covered
December 19, 2019
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/12/how-to-set-up-your-own-nebula-mesh-vpn-step-by-step/

Today, we're going to dive a little deeper into how you can set up your own Nebula private mesh network—along with a little more detail about why you might (or might not) want to.
VPN mesh versus traditional VPNs
The biggest selling point of Nebula is that it's not "just" a VPN, it's a distributed VPN mesh. A conventional VPN is much simpler than a mesh and uses a simple star topology: all clients connect to a server, and any additional routing is done manually on top of that. All VPN traffic has to flow through that central server, whether it makes sense in the grander scheme of things or not.
[...]
Conclusion
Right now, Nebula's probably best used by sysadmins and hobbyists who are determined to take advantage of its dynamic routing and don't mind the extremely visible nuts and bolts and lack of anything even faintly like a friendly interface. We definitely don't recommend it in its current form to "normal users"—whether that means yourself or somebody you need to support.
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Nebula VPN routes between hosts privately, flexibly, and efficiently

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