The only downside to this is that you send more data with spiped. """ Can significantly increase bandwidth usage for interactive sessions: It sends data

The only downside to this is that you send more data with spiped. """ Can significantly increase bandwidth usage for interactive sessions: It sends data in packets of 1024 bytes, and pads smaller messages up to this length, so a 1 byte write could be expanded to 1024 bytes if it cannot be coalesced with adjacent bytes. """ -- https://code.google.com/p/spiped/source/browse/trunk/README More secure, but more overhead. That said, I love spiped. I use it to secure a few mysql replication streams and a couple other things. Works great. I wonder if there is anything like spiped that provides something similar to openvpn's tls-auth (HMAC auth) functionality, for protocols that already provide encryption.