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Tcpcrypt

Tcpcrypt is a protocol that attempts to encrypt (almost) all of your network traffic. Unlike other security mechanisms, Tcpcrypt works out of the box: it requires no configuration, no changes to applications, and your network connections will continue to work even if the remote end does not support Tcpcrypt, in which case connections will gracefully fall back to standard clear-text TCP.

Tcpcrypt supports Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, and FreeBSD.

For more information, see tcpcrypt.org.

Installing tcpcrypt

git clone git://github.com/sorbo/tcpcrypt.git
cd tcpcrypt/user
./configure
make
sudo ./launch_tcpcryptd.sh

The launch script starts tcpcryptd and adds firewall rules to divert Web and local port 7777 (an arbitrarily chosen port number) traffic to tcpcryptd. When the script exits (on Ctrl-C or kill), it restores your firewall config to its former state--no permanent changes are made.

On Linux, you must first install libnfnetlink, libnetfilter_queue, and libcap.

Optional: running make install will install libtcpcrypt and tcpcrypt headers, for building apps that use tcpcrypt's session ID.

Try it out

Go to http://tcpcrypt.org/test.php with tcpcryptd running. If tcpcrypt is working, you'll be able to join the tcpcrypt Hall of Fame and your tcpcrypt session ID will be displayed at the bottom of the page.

Now let's examine the packets going over the wire by starting tcpdump and then reloading the URL above.

sudo tcpdump -X -s0 host tcpcrypt.org

Compare this tcpdump output, which appears encrypted (or at least unreadable), with the cleartext packets you would see without tcpcryptd running.

A final netcat example:

# in tcpcrypt/user
sudo ./launch_tcpcryptd.sh & 
nc -l 7777 &
sudo tcpdump -i lo -n -s0 -vvvv -X tcp port 7777 &
echo hello, world! | nc localhost 7777

# clean up
sudo killall tcpcryptd tcpdump

Troubleshooting

If it's not working, the most likely causes are the following.

  • Your browser already had an open, non-tcpcrypted TCP connection to tcpcrypt.org before you ran the launch script. Quit and reopen your browser, wait 30 seconds, or use a different browser to retrieve the tcpcrypt.org URL.

  • There's a conflict with your existing firewall rules. See the firewall setup section in the install guide for your platform.

Visit http://wiki.github.com/sorbo/tcpcrypt/troubleshooting if you're still unable to make it work.

To build the test_tcpcrypt utility, run make check from user/. Run test_tcpcrypt -v to see the various tests that it can run.

More info

The INSTALL-* files have more detailed installation and firewall setup instructions. See tcpcrypt.org for general info, including the protocol specification and the tcpcrypt paper, "The case for ubiquitous transport-level encryption", presented at USENIX Security 2010.

The code repository lives at http://github.com/sorbo/tcpcrypt.