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Important to know the security tradeoffs of the Tailscale commercial product. At the very least people will learn about all the pieces.

by th0ma5 1y ago

jychang 1y ago
Headscale isn't commercial
Lammy 1y ago
The privacy tradeoffs are much worse :/ https://tailscale.com/kb/1011/log-mesh-traffic https://tailscale.com/kb/1011/log-mesh-traffic “Each Tailscale agent in your distributed network streams its logs to a central log server (at log.tailscale.com). This includes real-time events for open and close events for every inter-machine connection (TCP or UDP) on your network.” RE: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/ https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
- varenc 1y ago
  I believe setting the "TS_NO_LOGS_NO_SUPPORT=1" env disables this logging.
  - th0ma5 1y ago
    That reminds me of a complaint that I had with a visualization library that kept pushing the open source project to be tied into their hosting racket. I brought up how lots of security organizations at the time wouldn't understand how much of a massive problem it was for the end user to decide to make the data immediately available to the entire Internet. It feels wrong that such implications could be missed from a set of environment variables just being missing. Usually you want things to fail safely ...
    - varenc 1y ago
      Agreed it's a bit annoying how non-discoverable this is. Wish it was in some sort of onboarding prompt. But I can see Tailscale's argument for making it the way it is. Tailscale is really targeting the business market, especially since their product is basically free for personal use. In a corporate environment, I imagine that the client logs are actually hugely valuable to the corporate customers themselves. It lets them see who is accessing what and is super critical when doing a post-mortem after a hack. (also no actual traffic content is logged) But I still keep client logging disabled for my personal use.
  - Lammy 1y ago
    Yep, despite the extremely FUD-y variable name, though there's still no way to opt out on iOS or Android: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/13174 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/13174 There's an unmerged PR for the Android client: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale-android/pull/695 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale-android/pull/695

Important to know the security tradeoffs of the Tailscale commercial product. At the very least people will learn about all the pieces.

by th0ma5 1y ago

Important to know the security tradeoffs of the Tailscale commercial product. At the very least people will learn about all the pieces.

jychang 1y ago

Headscale isn't commercial

Lammy 1y ago

The privacy tradeoffs are much worse :/ https://tailscale.com/kb/1011/log-mesh-traffic https://tailscale.com/kb/1011/log-mesh-traffic “Each Tailscale agent in your distributed network streams its logs to a central log server (at log.tailscale.com). This includes real-time events for open and close events for every inter-machine connection (TCP or UDP) on your network.” RE: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/ https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

varenc 1y ago
I believe setting the "TS_NO_LOGS_NO_SUPPORT=1" env disables this logging.
- th0ma5 1y ago
  That reminds me of a complaint that I had with a visualization library that kept pushing the open source project to be tied into their hosting racket. I brought up how lots of security organizations at the time wouldn't understand how much of a massive problem it was for the end user to decide to make the data immediately available to the entire Internet. It feels wrong that such implications could be missed from a set of environment variables just being missing. Usually you want things to fail safely ...
  - varenc 1y ago
    Agreed it's a bit annoying how non-discoverable this is. Wish it was in some sort of onboarding prompt. But I can see Tailscale's argument for making it the way it is. Tailscale is really targeting the business market, especially since their product is basically free for personal use. In a corporate environment, I imagine that the client logs are actually hugely valuable to the corporate customers themselves. It lets them see who is accessing what and is super critical when doing a post-mortem after a hack. (also no actual traffic content is logged) But I still keep client logging disabled for my personal use.
- Lammy 1y ago
  Yep, despite the extremely FUD-y variable name, though there's still no way to opt out on iOS or Android: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/13174 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/13174 There's an unmerged PR for the Android client: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale-android/pull/695 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale-android/pull/695