WireHub

WireHub (in a shell, wh) builds decentralized, peer-to-peer and secure overlay networks. It is small (<10KLOC) and tends to be simple-to-use and easily extendable.

It is built upon WireGuard tunnels and provides distributed peer discovery & routing capabilities, NAT trasversal, extendable name resolving, ...

⚠️ Not ready for production! This is still a work-in-progress. It still requires some work to be clean and secure. The current code is provided for testing only.

Features

• Single file network description: a configuration of a network is a list of the public key, private IPs and hostnames for each node.

• Decentralized peer discovery: WireHub peers form a authentified Kademilia DHT network, which is the by-default discovery mechanism to find new peers. Sybil attack is mitigated with a configurable Proof-of-Work parameter (see workbits);

• Peer-to-peer and relayed communication: WireHub goes through NATs, using UPnP IGD to map new ports on compatible routers, or using UDP Hole Punching techniques. If a P2P communication cannot be established, network traffic is relayed through the DHT.

Getting started

Quickstart with Docker

Run a minimal environment with WireHub installed.

docker run -it --cap-add NET_ADMIN wirehub/wh /bin/sh

Run a testing environment with auto-completion enabled, testing scripts and debug tools installed, ...

docker run -it --cap-add NET_ADMIN wirehub/sandbox /bin/bash

If you want to compile the Docker images from source,

git clone --recursive https://github.com/gawen/wirehub
cd wirehub
make docker docker-sandbox

A simple network with two nodes

First, generate two keys, one for each node.

$ wh genkey | tee node_a.sk | wh pubkey | tee node_a.k
zW-1lBeQ7IkT6NW6hL_NsV4eOPOwJi_rt1vO-omOEmQ
$ wh genkey | tee node_b.sk | wh pubkey | tee node_b.k
g878Bf9ZDc4IzFSUhWFTO1VYFVmHD5XfvEsVn83Dsho

The private keys are stored in the .sk files. The public keys are stored in the .k files.

Generate a WireHub configuration

echo "name tutorial
subnet 10.0.42.0/24

boot P17zMwXJFbBdJEn05RFIMADw9TX5_m2xgf31OgNKX3w bootstrap.wirehub.io
trust node_a `cat node_a.k`
trust node_b `cat node_b.k`" > config

File config should be like this:

name tutorial           # name of network
subnet 10.0.42.0/24     # private subnetwork

# one DHT bootstrap node
boot P17zMwXJFbBdJEn05RFIMADw9TX5_m2xgf31OgNKX3w bootstrap.wirehub.io

# two nodes, node_a & node_b
trust node_a zW-1lBeQ7IkT6NW6hL_NsV4eOPOwJi_rt1vO-omOEmQ
trust node_b g878Bf9ZDc4IzFSUhWFTO1VYFVmHD5XfvEsVn83Dsho

To start the network, run on node_a ...

wh up ./config private-key ./node_a.sk

... and on node_b ...

wh up ./config private-key ./node_b.sk

After some time, each node should be able to ping themselves.

# ping node_b
PING 10.0.42.3 (10.0.42.3): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.0.42.2: seq=0 ttl=64 time=106.801 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.42.2: seq=1 ttl=64 time=49.778 ms

You can check the overlay network status

# wh
interface wh-zW-1lBeQ7, network tutorial, node node_a <NAT>
  public key: zW-1lBeQ7IkT6NW6hL_NsV4eOPOwJi_rt1vO-omOEmQ

  peers
     node_b

While the daemon is running, you can modify the network configuration and reload it.

# echo "trust node_c 9OtorxsAqPqZkJ-fAYNRAPr9piMWKMLnGqOVVpMUvXY" >> ./config
# wh reload wh-zW-1lBeQ7

You may stop the WireHub node as so:

wh down wh-zW-1lBeQ7

Advise: use auto-completion to avoid writing wirehub interface, peer's keys or other arguments. For example,

# wh do<TAB>
  wh down <TAB>
  wh down wh-zW-1lBeQ7

A use-case with WireHub: zero-netcat

Zero Netcat, or 0nc, is a modified version of Netcat which runs over WireHub. It has the nice property to be secure, peer-to-peer and agnostic of the network topology.

On one node, run the WireHub sandbox.

$ docker run -it --cap-add NET_ADMIN wirehub/sandbox /bin/bash

Run 0nc.

node_a # 0nc.lua
znc invitation: ncuJonSJOS1DlFtb3HdgDJczPilrs0oPR9pwRpa_7WXwO0z-xioe_g9cdcMZkpV2b5lN7j3eLILjplBffvjdcw

Copy the znc invitation. Run another WireHub sandbox, call 0nc with the invitation as argument.

node_b # 0nc.lua ncuJonSJOS1DlFtb3HdgDJczPilrs0oPR9pwRpa_7WXwO0z-xioe_g9cdcMZkpV2b5lN7j3eLILjplBffvjdcw

STDIN of node_a is now pipe-d into STDOUT of node_b, and vice-versa.

Start a public node

The minimal configuration for a node is something like this,

name public
workbit 8
boot P17zMwXJFbBdJEn05RFIMADw9TX5_m2xgf31OgNKX3w bootstrap.wirehub.io

Only a bootstrap node is listed, but no trusted nodes. A node with this configuration will join the WireHub DHT and only provide support for discovery peers and relaying data (which is a good thing for the DHT's health).

Start a public node,

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gawen/wirehub/master/config/public > ./config
wh up ./config

Check the neighbour peers in the DHT,

# wh show wh-gOVQwCSUxK all
interface wh-gOVQwCSUxK, network public, node <>
  public key: gOVQwCSUxKUhUrkUSF0aDvssDfWVrrnm47ZMp5GJtDg

  peers
  ◒  BB_O_4Qxzw: 1.2.3.4:55329 (bucket:1)
  ◒  C4mfi1ltU9: 1.2.3.4:46276 (bucket:1)
  ◒  Dng_TaMHei: 1.2.3.4:6465 (bucket:1)
  ◒  GjIX1RdmDj: 1.2.3.4:53850 (bucket:1)
  ◒  G9qk6znNL5: 1.2.3.4:4523 (bucket:1)
  ◒  J_RXehMJiw: 1.2.3.4:13962 (bucket:1)
  ◒  PgjYqFfsyS: 1.2.3.4:39582 (bucket:1)
  ●  P17zMwXJFb: 51.15.227.165:62096 (bucket:1)
  [...]

Dependencies

• Libpcap
• Libsodium
• Lua
• miniupnpc
• WireGuard
• optionally, Docker

Requirements

• Linux or Docker
• WireGuard

Current limitations

• Untrusted cryptography: even if WireHub basics cryptographic routines are based on the trusted Libsodium, the WireHub cryptographic architecture has not been audited yet. If you're interested to contribute on this part, help is very welcome!

• Automatic testing: a lot of work needs to be done to make real automatic testing possible with WireHub. Current efforts are on branch dev-testbed and micronet.

• Still panic: still quite rough to use. Do not expect the daemon to be stable;

• Poor documentation: WireHub was a side project and still lacks documentation.

• For a relayed peer, only one relay is used: the traffic is not distributed yet between several relays, which makes a single point of failure of WireHub relay mechanisms;

• Only IPv4 private addresses: implemeting IPv6 private addresses requires some additional work;

• and related to WireGuard, which is still under active development.

Future

• Zero-configuration IP6 networking with IPv6 ORCHID addresses, to automatically allocate each peer a default private IP (see wh orchid);

Overall source code architecture

WireHub's source code is stored in src/. wh.lua is the main Lua module to import WireHub's engine.

The source code of the CLI tool wh is stored in src/tools/. Its entry point is src/tools/cli.lua.

The core of WireHub is written in C and stored in src/core/. It is a native Lua module called whcore, defined in src/core/whcorelib.c.

Please refer to the documentation in each files for more info.