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Comment by pot8n | Hacker News Reader

Honestly that's the least of all problems and catastrophes of Tailscale. You must have 1000% of confidence in their own servers security, if the published public keys hosted on their servers have been tampered then the entire network is compromised. Also, if their service is down, you will be unable to connect to your network even if it is completely fine and working.

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Tailscale is open source, it should be possible to set up your own server.

The hosted Tailscale product is meant for GSuite customers who want an peer-to-peer VPN with corporate SSO. Yes, you have to trust them - SSO login is inherently centralized. My company uses it, it works great.

I am not really sure you understand how it works. There is no hosted/not hosted versions of it. You must connect your "opensource" client/agent through their coordination servers hosted by them to host and publish the public key to the other devices in your network and you can not skip their service. So Tailscale is effectively as opensource as any commercial opensource VPN client. It's entirely useless when not used with their commercial service and users have zero control over the software unless when used with their servers. The "open source" thing is great from a marketing and business perspective because you basically benefit from the open source marketing and the community thing from the unsuspecting users and enthusiasts pros without giving away literally anything.

The backend (minus the web UI?) is open source as well.

What's the more-secure alternative?

Exchange your keys ahead of time, preferably offline, and just run wireguard yourself. You may need a service discovery solution depending on your networking situation.

"You may need a service discovery solution"

You mean... like tailscale does? (e.g. They have devices registered with a name and you can access them. They're all given static IPs so an internal DNS server could simply resolve their names... kind of like service discovery)

Right and Tailscale is a fine product for a variety of cases but there are cases where TailScale may not be a fit for you either due to the gSuite Integration, different privacy constraints or just not wanting to trust someone else with your vpn.

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