[feature request] To support "Wireguard over raw TCP"

Tue Sep 25 18:29:46 CEST 2018

Hello StarBrilliant,

I think that what Kexianbin is trying to make clear is that it would be
nice if  native TCP support would be added in WireGuard.
He (probably) currently uses udp2raw as an alternative, because an UDP-only
VPN is sadly enough not working in every situation.
With him, there have been others pitching ideas on how to wrap the
WireGuard UDP traffic in TCP, which in my opinion, is a poor idea.

So, why would UDP for a VPN service not be enough?

First of all, most VPN traffic obfuscation techniques require a TCP
connection instead of UDP.
VPN usage is particularly useful in countries were Internet censorship is
applied.
Since obfuscating VPN traffic comes with performance overhead, wrapping the
UDP in TCP and obfuscating this would kill the performance advantage
WireGuard has over other protocols.

However, what is arguably more important: various corporate firewalls
(hotels/restaurants/offices) are known to block UDP (for random ports
besides the standard DNS 53 port etc.).
In these instances, it would be useful to have the possibility to build a
fall back to TCP instead of UDP in a VPN service (or even the protocol
itself).

Also, various researchers I have spoken to told me that sometimes they need
a more reliable (TCP) connection, which is then more important than the
speed UDP provides.

I'm looking into the possibilities to deploy the WireGuard VPN protocol for
an existing VPN service currently using OpenVPN, but I keep stumbling on
the problem that WIreGuard does not support TCP.
I (think I) have read all posts regarding TCP for WireGuard, but it seems
that there do not exists a good way to tackle this problem.

Could someone tell whether or not TCP would be a future additional option
for WireGuard, and why (not)?

Also, do you think there actually does exist a neat and fitting solution
for the problems I described?

Kind regards,

Breus Blaauwendraad

On Tue, 25 Sep 2018 at 17:54, StarBrilliant <coder at poorlab.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 25, 2018 at 1:17 PM KeXianbin(http://diyism.com)
> <kexianbin at diyism.com> wrote:
> >
> > Currently, I'm using udp2raw-tunnel to transform wireguard udp traffic
> into raw tcp (config files as follows),
> > It's very stable on my home network than using wireguard alone,
> > But if we can integrate RAW TCP feature into wireguard, it would
> significantly improve performance and stability for end users.
> >
> >
> > from:
> https://gist.github.com/diyism/1b80903a83776675031c73ae499438d8#file-wireguard_config-txt-L145
> >
> > $wget
> https://github.com/wangyu-/udp2raw-tunnel/releases/download/20180830.2/udp2raw_binaries.tar.gz
> > $tar xzvf udp2raw_binaries.tar.gz
> > $sudo cp udp2raw_amd64 /usr/bin/
> > $sudo udp2raw_amd64 -c -l127.0.0.2:24448 -r<server ip>:24447 -a
> > $cat /etc/wireguard/wg0.conf
> > [Interface]
> > PrivateKey = <client privkey>
> > Address = 10.0.0.3/32
> > ListenPort = 24447
> > MTU = 1300
> > PostUp = ip route add 10.0.0.0/24 dev wg0 && wg set wg0 peer <server
> pubkey> allowed-ips 0.0.0.0/0
> > PostDown = ip route del 10.0.0.0/24
> >
> > [Peer]
> > #10.0.0.1
> > PublicKey = <server pubkey>
> > Endpoint = 127.0.0.2:24448
> > #AllowedIPs = 0.0.0.0/0
> >
> > $sudo wg-quick down wg0 ; sudo wg-quick up wg0
> > $ping 10.0.0.1
> > 64 bytes from 10.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2113 ttl=64 time=183 ms
> > $sudo ip route add 104.24.0.0/16 dev wg0
> > $ping myip.ipip.net
> > PING myip.ipip.net (104.24.20.50) 56(84) bytes of data.
> > 64 bytes from 104.24.20.50 (104.24.20.50): icmp_seq=1 ttl=60 time=185 ms
> > $curl http://myip.ipip.net
> > IP：<server ip>
> >
> > #take care, "MTU = 1300" in wg0.conf is needed when wireguard over
> udp2raw, or else most https requests will be blocked because of mtu problem.
>
>
> Hello Kexianbin,
>
> This is an UNOFFICIAL response to your question. (But I think the
> official developers may have similar answers.)
>
> Wireguard probably will not accept an official integration to udp2raw.
> The reasons are:
>
> 1) Wireguard wants to keep their kernel part code minimized, therefore
> easy for security auditing, and less bugs.The UDP protocol is actually
> very simple and straightforward. (By the way, if you intended to use
> Wireguard in China, be informed that this is a protocol that is very
> easy to block by the ISP.)
>
> 2) I have read the source code of udp2raw. To be frank, the code is of
> very low quality. For this reason, I don't think udp2raw would be
> integrated into Wireguard unless it's rewritten.
>
> 3) Udp2raw is not suitable for everyone or for every country. For
> example udp2raw may have problems passing middleboxes, which is common
> among satellite ISPs in Oceania. Middleboxes break and resemble TCP
> segments thus make udp2raw literally unusable. Also it is not
> congestion friendly (by design), so a massive deployment may affect
> the global Internet ecology.
>
> However the good news is, Wireguard provides an open control interface
> (see https://www.wireguard.com/xplatform/ ). By utilizing this
> interface, we can develop an alternate frontend application other than
> the official command "wg", that automatically sets up the kernel
> Wireguard kernel part and a userland udp2raw part, packaged as one
> application.
>
>
> My words for Wireguard developers:
>
> 1) In case you may not know the udp2raw protocol, here is a
> description. Some ISPs in certain countries have strange QoS strategy
> that deprioritize UDP packets during network congestion, resulting a
> 50% loss rate or more for UDP. The udp2raw protocol simulates a
> three-way TCP handshake and add TCP header to UDP packets so they will
> not be dropped. This protocol does not do congestion control or rate
> control, neither does it understand any TCP semantics. It's a dirty
> hack for dirty ISP, not suitable for everyone, but overwhelmingly
> useful in certain countries.
>
> 2) Wireguard currently does not support binding to localhost. This is
> required for any third-party plugins upon Wireguard to work. We might
> need to consider binding to localhost an important feature to go in
> the near future.
>
>
> Best regards,
> StarBrilliant
> _______________________________________________
> WireGuard mailing list
> WireGuard at lists.zx2c4.com
> https://lists.zx2c4.com/mailman/listinfo/wireguard
>
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