Comment by femiagbabiaka
12 hours ago
> I can get away with exposing a port on my router
using wireguard is awesome, but I wouldn't say deploying and maintaining it lacks complexity exactly. and you didn't get rid of attack surface, you just made it your responsibility ;)
Always is your responsibility even with tailscale. Now it is his responsibility without tailscale.
Attack surface almost entirely goes away if you just require a good port knock first! I do that with my protection SSH servers and it works just fine. Also prevents anyone from knowing there even is an SSH server there. Or any server if it doesn't respond to pings either, and only uses reverse tunnels to accept public connections
Wireguard doesn’t respond to malformed packets or handshakes from unknown devices by design.
Oh, awesome!
Is there a way to automate port knocks in your .ssh/config? I think that’s the main reason why I haven’t added it to my home server.
Technically you could use a ProxyCommand that does the knock and then runs nc to your target.
Port knocking is idiotic and amounts to Biff Tannen's "only I know how to start this car".
Dunno, in combination with having an up to date system following best practices, port knocking is probably going to save you when bots start scanning the internet with the next SSH 0day. Any amount of friction will cause the bots to move to the next IP address.
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It's more like "only I know how to find this keyhole". You still need the key then, you're just also adding some defense against picking.
It would be idiotic to use the knock as the only authentication, which is why I don't.
To be quite honest, I just like the aesthetics of it.
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With AI, the complexity doesn't really matter anymore. Codex or Claude can easily configure complex site-to-site setups and peer configurations on mobile devices. I did this by hand before and it was hard and difficult to get right. Now I just tell AI and it does so perfectly, checks and verifies things. AI made life so easy.
No amount of claude can handle the key thing that Tailscale fixes about wireguard, all of the connection to connection logic is handled be it direct, via all sorts of weird hole punching or via relays. Wireguard itself is horrible to do this with, half the time you're just looking at `wg status` wondering why the packet counter isn't incrementing today. It can never achieve the magic that is a direct connection between plane wifi and a host that's behind NAT on the ground.
I can’t think of a single time I’ve wanted to connect between two hosts when I haven’t specifically allowed one through a firewall
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This is true, but I still wouldn't discount the possibility of mistakes. It's good to know how your home network works. Even Opus 5.5 can make some pretty dumb mistakes, particularly if it doesn't have the full picture.
Humans also make mistakes. At this point, I trust AI more than humans when it comes to casually configuring VPNs. I've read many who exposed things by mistake on reddit. AI has nearly solved this, probably is a solved issue at this point.
I would not personally expose my devices over a VPN that I self-hosted and set up purely through AI unless I felt like I understood how it worked completely. But that's probably just personal paranoia.
Just go read reddit threads on people who do this by hand following half baked guides. There's a huge population doing this, now everyone is switching to AI. It's a big win and safer. Not everyone is a trained network engineer, but now they are with AI
It makes no sense at all to configure a >3 nodes wireguard setup with straight wireguard.
Wireguard is the building block for higher level tools like Tailscale to build on.