I’ve been accessing my servers over Yggdrasil for the last few years and I never see it mentioned in self hosting communities, so here you go !
Yggdrasil works over IPv6 and brings encryption at the network interface level (similarly to a VPN). The cool thing is that your IP address is derived from your private key, so when you try to connect to a specific IP, your packets are encrypted so that ONLY the destination server can decrypt it (thus preventing MITM attacks). And as everything is encrypted at the NIC level, you can safely use plain text protocols ;)
How cool is that ?
Does this require a static IP address? Can it be easily used when all nodes are behind a NAT with dynamic IP addresses?
No static IP required ! I use it on my phone over LTE and it works great. Same goes for the NAT, I use it at work to where my laptop sits behind a NAT and I don’t have any issue.
From my understanding by reading the website, if non of your devices have a static IPv6 address, you need to add a public node, is that true?
this sounds a lot like part of how cloudflares tunnel works. me like!
I never used CF tunnels, but from the descriptions I read, it seem to serve a very different purpose. Yggdrasil will just connect your server to an overlay network that’s fully encrypted (but public). If you expose services over Yggdrasil, your server will be directly exposed on the network, you just get full encryption as a bonus. Cloudfare on the other hand will “shift” your server access to their own server, and redirect traffic internally to your server over a secure channel. This means that your server is not publicly accessible.
Not quite true, I use cloudflared daily, its simply a daemon that connects back to CF. The daemon is configured on the CF side to proxy various local network (class C) URIs. I usually toss the daemon in the private network with the containers. The machines themselves still work fine over normal internet, the daemon does not cut a system off it simply provides proxy forward services.
This sounds very similar but without the configurability, just whatever I toss on the line I get. Which for the cases im thinking (replacing VPNs as suggested here) it will be great.
🤯That is super cool! Is there a good comparison between this and WireGuard from a security perspective? I know Cloudflare is moving away from WireGuard and implementing MASQUE which uses HTTP/3+QUIC. Wonderful to see multiple attempts at this, interested to see what gets the adoption.
