We built ZeroTier initially for this use case, and though it's now maturing into something more powerful (SDN type features) it's still very useful for this and

We built ZeroTier initially for this use case, and though it's now maturing into something more powerful (SDN type features) it's still very useful for this and the WAN use case is not going away. https://www.zerotier.com/ https://www.zerotier.com/ https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierSDK https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierSDK The difference between something like ZeroTier and Tor is a trade-off between meta-data privacy and latency/speed. (Both encrypt the actual payload.) Efficient connectivity and anonymity are antagonistic goals. You can't provide both since optimization for one of these two goals implies violation of the other. Tor provides meta-data privacy, but it's impossible to do this without sacrificing a lot of performance. If you allow low latency on a privacy network, latency can be used to triangulate the endpoint. Rule of thumb: latency can never be lower than about 1/2 the time it takes a photon to travel the Earth's diameter. In practice it's higher since you must also account for median router latency. Same goes for high throughput though in that case you need much more detailed intel on the physical network. Rule of thumb here: if throughput is higher than global mean it can be used to rule out and thus narrow down paths in the graph. ZeroTier provides fast efficient low-latency direct connectivity but to do this requires that it introduce people directly, thus revealing peoples' locations (IP-wise) to each other. This is a hard requirement since the most efficient path is by definition the most direct and therefore de-anonymized (again IP-wise) path. You can't go directly A<>B without A knowing where B is and vice versa. Edit: I speak a bit theoretically above. In practice a weaker anonymity system could be deployed closer to the last mile to hide people at e.g. city resolution. But AFIAK this is not what Tor does, would probably require either a huge critical mass or last-mile carrier participation or both, and would still have a performance impact.