Comment by xrmagnum
2 hours ago
I ended up building something in this space recently (TunnelBuddy – https://www.tunnelbuddy.net I’m the author) that lets you use a friend’s machine as an exit node over WebRTC.
One of the design decisions I made was P2P or nothing: there’s a small signalling service, but no TURN/relay servers. If the peers can’t establish a direct connection, the tunnel just doesn’t come up.
The trade-off is fewer successful connections in weird NAT setups, but in return you know your traffic never transits a third-party relay – it goes straight from your client to your friend’s endpoint.
My traffic will transit third parties all the time, since it's going over the Internet. What's the problem with relays, if the traffic is end-to-end encrypted?