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Some questions around this: * How is this different than other existing VPN services? (opennvp, wireguard, etc) * How does this new protocol work? * Is this

• elgunlee 6y ago
  Actually I tried to explain all questions like these in original HN post, but removed because of 2000 chars limits. VanillaVPN as name suggests focus on simplicity, not security. Other VPN protocols always encrypt traffic between you and servers with algorithms like AES-256. They don't have options to disable it, and transmit all packets without encryption. Disabling encryption has benefits like low CPU & Battery usage and increased bandwidth speeds. But isn't unencrypted VPN bad idea? Actually, NO. For security, people already using TLS/SSL (HTTPS). It means your connection to websites are already secure, re-encrypting them twice doesn't make sense, instead it cause high CPU & Battery usage. Also, VanillaVPN uses JSON for handshaking process. It is much easier to implement and maintain. And server has some sort of DHCP feature, capable of assigning new IP addresses to connected clients automatically from pool. So you don't need to preconfigure clients at the server like you do in Wireguard or OpenVPN. For source code, it's not publicly available right now. But I will publish it in the next few months as open source.
  • DougN7 6y ago
    Is the handshake unencrypted? Would this make it easy to MITM?