path: root/curvetun.8

.\" netsniff-ng - the packet sniffing beast
.\" Copyright 2013 Daniel Borkmann.
.\" Subject to the GPL, version 2.
.PP
.TH CURVETUN 8 "03 March 2013" "Linux" "netsniff-ng toolkit"
.SH NAME
curvetun \- a lightweight Curve25519 IP tunnel
.PP
.SH SYNOPSIS
.PP
\fB curvetun\fR [\fIoptions\fR]
.PP
.SH DESCRIPTION
curvetun is a lightweight, high-speed ECDH multiuser IP tunnel for Linux
that is based on epoll(2). curvetun uses the Linux TUN/TAP interface and
supports {IPv4, IPv6} over {IPv4, IPv6} with UDP or TCP as carrier protocols.
.PP
It has an integrated packet forwarding tree, thus multiple users with
different IPs can be handled via a single tunnel device on the server side
and flows are scheduled for processing in a CPU efficient way, at least in the
case of TCP as the carrier protocol.
.PP
For key management, public-key cryptography based on elliptic curves are being
used and packets are encrypted end-to-end by the symmetric stream cipher
Salsa20 and authenticated by the MAC Poly1305, where keys have previously
been computed with the ECDH key agreement protocol Curve25519.
.PP
Cryptography is based on Daniel J. Bernstein's networking and cryptography
library ``NaCl''. By design, curvetun does not provide any particular pattern
or default port numbers that gives certainty that the connection from a
particular flow is actually running curvetun.
.PP
However, if you have a further need to bypass censorship, you can try using
curvetun in combination with Tor's obfsproxy or Telex. Furthermore, curvetun
also protects you against replay attacks and DH man-in-the-middle attacks.
Additionally, server-side syslog event logging can also be disabled to not
reveal any critical user connection data.
.PP
.IP " 1." 4
obfsproxy from the TOR project
.RS 4
\%https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy.html.en
.RE
.PP
.IP " 2." 4
Telex, anti-censorship in the network infrastructure
.RS 4
\%https://telex.cc/
.RE
.PP
.SH OPTIONS
.PP
todo FIXME
.PP
.SH CRYPTOGRAPHY
Encrypted IP tunnels are often used to create virtual private networks (VPN),
where parts of the network can only be reached via an insecure or untrusted medium
such as the Internet. Only a few software utilities exists to create such tunnels,
or, VPNs. Two popular representatives of such software are OpenVPN and VTUN.
.PP
The latter also introduced the TUN/TAP interfaces into the Linux kernel. VTUN
only has a rather basic encryption module, that does not fit todays
cryptographic needs. By default, MD5 is used to create 128-Bit wide keys for
the symmetric BlowFish cipher in ECB mode [1].
.PP
Although OpenSSL is used in both VTUN and OpenVPN, OpenVPN is much more
feature rich regarding ciphers and user authentication. Nevertheless, letting
people choose ciphers or authentication methods is not necessarily a
good thing: administrators could either prefer speed over security and
therefore choose weak ciphers, so that the communication system will be as
good as without any cipher; they could choose weak passwords for symmetric
encryption or they could misconfigure the communication system by having too
much choice of ciphers and too little experience for picking the right one.
.PP
Next to the administration issues, there are also software development issues.
Cryptographic libraries like OpenSSL are a huge mess and too low-level and
complex to properly fully understand or correctly apply, so that they form a
further ground for vulnerabilities of such software.
.PP
In 2010, the cryptographers Tanja Lange and Daniel J. Bernstein have therefore
created and published a cryptography library for networking, which is called
NaCl (pronounced ''salt''). NaCl addresses such problems as mentioned in
OpenSSL and, in contrast to the rather generic use of OpenSSL, was created
with a strong focus on public-key authenticated encryption based on elliptic
curve cryptography, which is used in curvetun. Partially quoting Daniel J.
Bernstein:
.PP
RSA is somewhat older than elliptic-curve cryptography: RSA was introduced
in 1977, while elliptic-curve cryptography was introduced in 1985. However,
RSA has shown many more weaknesses than elliptic-curve cryptography. RSA's
effective security level was dramatically reduced by the linear sieve in the
late 1970s, by the quadratic sieve and ECM in the 1980s, and by the
number-field sieve in the 1990s. For comparison, a few attacks have been
developed against some rare elliptic curves having special algebraic
structures, and the amount of computer power available to attackers has
predictably increased, but typical elliptic curves require just as much
computer power to break today as they required twenty years ago.
.PP
IEEE P1363 standardized elliptic-curve cryptography in the late 1990s,
including a stringent list of security criteria for elliptic curves. NIST
used the IEEE P1363 criteria to select fifteen specific elliptic curves at
five different security levels. In 2005, NSA issued a new ''Suite B''
standard, recommending the NIST elliptic curves (at two specific security
levels) for all public-key cryptography and withdrawing previous
recommendations of RSA.
.PP
curvetun uses a particular elliptic curve, Curve25519, introduced in the
following paper: Daniel J. Bernstein, ''Curve25519: new Diffie-Hellman speed
records,'' pages 207-228 in Proceedings of PKC 2006, edited by Moti Yung,
Yevgeniy Dodis, Aggelos Kiayias, and Tal Malkin, Lecture Notes in Computer
Science 3958, Springer, 2006, ISBN 3-540-33851-9.
.PP
This elliptic curve follows all of the standard IEEE P1363 security criteria.
It also follows new recommendations that achieve ''side-channel immunity''
and ''twist security'' while improving speed. What this means is that secure
implementations of Curve25519 are considerably simpler and faster than secure
implementations of, for example, NIST P-256; there are fewer opportunities for
implementors to make mistakes that compromise security, and mistakes are
more easily caught by reviewers.
.PP
An attacker who spends a billion dollars on special-purpose chips to attack
Curve25519, using the best attacks available today, has about 1 chance in
1000000000000000000000000000 of breaking Curve25519 after a year of computation.
One could achieve similar levels of security with 3000-bit RSA, but
encryption and authentication with 3000-bit RSA are not nearly fast enough
to handle tunnel traffic and would require much more space in network
packets.
.PP
.IP " 1." 4
Security analysis of VTun
.RS 4
\%http://www.off.net/~jme/vtun_secu.html
.RE
.PP
.IP " 2." 4
NaCl: Networking and Cryptography library
.RS 4
\%http://nacl.cr.yp.to/
.RE
.PP
.SH SETUP EXAMPLE
If you've never run curvetun before, you need to do an initial setup once.
.PP
First, make sure that the servers and clients clocks are periodically
synced, for example, by running an ntp daemon. This is necessary to protect
against replay attacks. Also, make sure you have read and write access to
/dev/net/tun. You should not run curvetun as root! Then, after you have assured
this, the first step is to generate keys and config files. On both the client
and server do:
.PP
.B curvetun -k
.PP
You are asked for a user name. You can use an email address or whatever suits
you. Here, we assume you have entered 'mysrv1' on the server and 'myclient1'
on the client side.
.PP
Now, all necessary files have been created under ~/.curvetun. Files include
``priv.key'', ``pub.key'', ``username', ``clients'' and ``servers''.
.PP
``clients'' and ``servers'' are empty at the beginning and need to be filled.
The ``clients'' file is meant for the server, so that it knows what clients
are allowed to connect. The ``servers'' file is for the client, where it can
select curvetun servers to connect to. Both files are kept very simple, so that
a single configuration line per client or server is sufficient.
.PP
The client needs to export its public key data for the server:
.PP
.B curvetun -x
.PP
todo FIXME
.PP
.SH NOTE
This software is an experimental prototype intended for researchers. It will most
likely mature over time, but it is currently not advised to use this software
when life is put at risk.
.PP
.SH LEGAL
curvetun is licensed under the GNU GPL version 2.0.
.PP
.SH HISTORY
.B curvetun
was originally written for the netsniff-ng toolkit by Daniel Borkmann. It is
currently maintained by Tobias Klauser <tklauser@distanz.ch> and Daniel
Borkmann <dborkma@tik.ee.ethz.ch>.
.PP
.SH SEE ALSO
.BR netsniff-ng (8),
.BR trafgen (8),
.BR mausezahn (8),
.BR bpfc (8),
.BR ifpps (8),
.BR flowtop (8),
.BR astraceroute (8)
.PP
.SH AUTHOR
Manpage was written by Daniel Borkmann.