If you're privacy conscious, please be aware that Tailscale by default is creating behavioral metadata from all of those computers for the Room 641As of the world about everything you do on your supposedly “private” network: https://tailscale.com/docs/features/logging
“This includes real-time events for open and close events for every inter-machine connection (TCP or UDP) on your network.”
I initially used WireGuard, but as my home lab scaled, it became unwieldy. Some people could work around these limitations with bash scripts, but if you have an heterogeneous environment (esp iOS clients), making programmatic configuration changes to WireGuard becomes trickier.
Today I use Tailscale (with Headscale as the control plane) for all users, and WireGuard as a emergency access to key servers.
And a damned good one at that. I can spend five minutes on a (family) nontechnical user's device and set it up to be able to access the parts of my network it needs to get to, and it's easy enough to use that I can walk them through the troubleshooting over the phone if it ever goes awry. Regardless of where they are or I am.
It does not. You need a public endpoint, but presumably the $5 VPS or the "homelab" provides that, or it's of little use for things like email, Web, or game servers.
Needing to do additional things like figure out firewall rules is exactly what I'm talking about. I enjoy tinkering for fun most of the time but I'm generally looking to tinker on something specific, not every step along the way.
One of my pet projects I need to get back to is an SDN to make configuration for mikrotik routers easier (particularly with VLAN's, wireguard or VPNS, or routing configuration between ports).
Winbox is nice in a sense because it tells you the true configuration. But what I really want is something that can start with a network diagram (e.g.) and then get the current state of the router, and then validate that against the network config.
Of course the default behavior that Tailscale forces you to reauthenticate periodically can cause the same problem unless... you turn it off. You know things like that always happen at the worst time.
On some OSes you could probably also use some additional 4->6 tunnel, but that probably doesn't work stacked under Wireguard on iOS and Android.
Headscale turns the $5 VPS into the thing that connects my laptop to my other compute resources while I am out and about.
For example, you can create a token that grants VPN access with inbound SSH as the only allowed traffic. Add that as a secret to GitHub Actions and now you can ad-hoc debug failing CI via `tailscale ssh`.
Definitely a place for both services, IMO.
> no mobile clients
I know of some people however who hacked up their own using the sanctum library (https://github.com/jorisvink/libkyrka)
You can't turn off the centralised element of Tailscale though, i.e. IP tracking etc.
So for the privacy conscious Tailscale remains a poor choice. Especially as they operate under US jurisdiction:
- "Tailscale US Inc., a Delaware corporation with registered address at 447 Sutter St Ste 405 #543, San Francisco, CA 94108, USA"
- "For any dispute not subject to arbitration you and Tailscale agree to submit to the personal and exclusive jurisdiction of and venue in the federal and state courts located in New York, NY".
You may jest "but its only metadata", but you can do a lot with metadata, especially if its all nicely attractively centralised like Tailscale.
What is Tailscale getting that my ISP and google/Facebook via their pixels and tracking scripts aren't?
Tons more. A lot could be written about, but a few "for starters" things to think about:
- The web is decentralised. And a lot of the web trackability can be dealt with in a dozen different ways. But Tailscale is centralised and all the data nicely structured (stable node keys etc.) and "ready to go" for metadata analysis.
- Tailscale have "behind the firewall" visibility at a far greater level, it enables building of a topology map and associated flows.
- Tailscale visibility is perhaps most concerning in relation to metadata surrounding mobile devices. Where is the device ? Is it in use ? Is it near other devices (from the same customer / other customers) ? etc. etc. etc.
But if you think Tailscale is bad for mobile devices because they might be able to tell that you're near another Tailscale user, that is absurd. If you have a need to be physically untrackable, the only solution is to leave your tracking device at home.
Like? What exactly could they plausibly do, that I should care about, if I otherwise have no reason to worry about these institutions?
In case you were not aware, spooks have focused on metadata analysis over "full take" (data) analysis for a very long time because they are far more effective and require less data to analyse. This has been the case at least since the early 2000s with Stellar Wind but arguably even the Stasi worked this way -- they cared a lot more about who you were talking to than what you were talking about. The Snowden revelations in 2013 talked almost entirely about metadata-only systems that were being used to invasively surveil the world.
If your point was more "I have nothing to hide" then you can find plenty of articles online to disabuse you of that notion. There's even a Wikipedia article about it[2].
[1]: https://abcnews.com/blogs/headlines/2014/05/ex-nsa-chief-we-... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
Can I even hide from NSA level adversaries without employing extreme methods? Assuming "no", then for this particular threat model do the tools employed next matter?
But there is a bigger point to be made: in my experience most privacy activists argue that taking an absolutist stance personally is counter-productive -- just because it is almost impossible to completely eliminate risks from your life does not mean you should give up and not try to minimise them. And of course, the goal for most people isn't to protect against targeted attacks (since that means you already need to take fugitive-on-the-run-level precautions), it's to avoid becoming a target in the first place.
Reality is, for normal people there's no point where worrying about spooks and taking actions to protect themselves is reasonable. As you say, there's nothing one can do against a targeted attack. But same is true for broad, untargeted sweeps - if they really care, they will find you anyway, and attempting to reduce your data exposure just flags you as an anomaly, making you more interesting, not less.
The whole "privacy vs spooks" threat analysis is not relevant to regular people.
> If you're privacy conscious, please be aware that Tailscale by default is creating behavioral metadata from all of those computers for the Room 641As of the world about everything you do on your supposedly “private” network
Is Tailscale creating additional metadata that doesn't already exist in "concentrated" form with my ISP? As a regular person trying to live a normal "internet enabled" life (self hosting a few things, sharing things with family or friends....) are there alternatives to Tailscale that leave substantially fewer traces for "Room 641s" and other similar entities, and doesn't just move the metadata collection to the hosting provider or the ISP?
And finally, does disabling logging in Tailscale mitigate those concerns? After all Tailscale will always be a target for data collection whether they cooperate or not by virtue of where they placed themselves. Similar to Cloudflare probably.
Yes, for connections between any pairs of machines that were previously entirely behind your NAT, unless you use bare LAN IP addresses for everything. Tailscale takes over DNS resolution very aggressively, so any use of short hostnames will have them resolve to Tailscale's CGNAT range instead even if they're on the same network.
I don't argue "I have nothing to hide", even uttering this phrase is giving in to privacy paranoia.
In reality, I have plenty to hide. But those who I want to hide it from, don't have access to the metadata you mention - and those who do have access, couldn't give less of a damn about the things I want to hide.