RVPN Server

A Poor Man's Reverse VPN written in Go

Context

Even in the worst of conditions the fanciest of firewalls can't stop a WebSocket running over https from creating a secure tunnel.

Whether at home behind a router that lacks UPnP compliance, at school, work, the library - or even on an airplane, we want any device (or even a browser or app) to be able to serve from anywhere.

Motivation

We originally wrote this in node.js as node-tunnel-server, but there are a few problems:

• metering
• resource utilization
• binary transfer

metering

We want to be able to meter all traffic on a socket. In node.js it wasn't feasible to be able to track the original socket handle all the way back from the web socket authentication through the various wrappers.

A user connects via a websocket to the tunnel server and an authentication token is presented. If the connection is established the socket should then be metered and reported including total bytes sent and received and size of payload bytes sent and received (because the tunnelling adds some overhead).

resource utilization

node.js does not support usage of multiple cores in-process. The overhead of passing socket connections between processes seemed non-trivial at best and likely much less efficient, and impossible at worst.

binary transfer

node.js doesn't handle binary data very well. People will be transferring gigabytes of data.

Short Term Goal

Build a server compatible with the node.js client (JWT authentication) that can meter authenticated connections, utilize multiple cores efficiently, and efficienty garbage collect gigabytes upon gigabytes of transfer.