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In a world moving towards "zero trust networking", this appears to be going in the opposite direction, where the network is now being implicitly trusted. This

In a world moving towards "zero trust networking", this appears to be going in the opposite direction, where the network is now being implicitly trusted. This enables unauthenticated file transfers between hosts on the same network. Given the world we live in today is that RCE vulnerabilities are relatively common, what happens when host1 gets some malware and uses this to transfer itself onto host2? I assume this has been considered, and it's been decided that the convenience of the feature outweighs the security and reputation risk considerations?

iso1210 5y ago
Isn't the tailscale work more to do with authenticating hosts than the network. You trust all communication decodable by a trusted public key. That still allows malware on a trusted end device to connect to you, but then if you've got malware on the box chances are it will have access to the private keys, authentication cookies etc, anyway - at least currently.
carlosf 5y ago
I guess in an ideal world where everything in your org is behind MFA, app authentication and protected from denial of service, then solutions like tailscale would not be needed. But my personal experience is that most software is completely hostile to good security practices and you end up having some perimeter security as well.
apenwarr 5y ago
Someone else mentioned that basically malware on your machine is expected to bypass all security layers. So we’re basically saying “the ‘new’ network layer is now as trustworthy as the app layer” rather than claiming everything is perfect, you’re right. This is one reason we limited taildrop to only transfer between devices owned by a single user for now, and only to drop files into controlled locations. Tailscale also has ACL policies for when you don’t trust all the endpoints to just do anything.

iso1210 5y ago

Isn't the tailscale work more to do with authenticating hosts than the network. You trust all communication decodable by a trusted public key. That still allows malware on a trusted end device to connect to you, but then if you've got malware on the box chances are it will have access to the private keys, authentication cookies etc, anyway - at least currently.

carlosf 5y ago

I guess in an ideal world where everything in your org is behind MFA, app authentication and protected from denial of service, then solutions like tailscale would not be needed. But my personal experience is that most software is completely hostile to good security practices and you end up having some perimeter security as well.

apenwarr 5y ago

Someone else mentioned that basically malware on your machine is expected to bypass all security layers. So we’re basically saying “the ‘new’ network layer is now as trustworthy as the app layer” rather than claiming everything is perfect, you’re right. This is one reason we limited taildrop to only transfer between devices owned by a single user for now, and only to drop files into controlled locations. Tailscale also has ACL policies for when you don’t trust all the endpoints to just do anything.