The main reason to switch from AES-256-GCM to ChaCha-Poly1305 is to remove a
dependency on OpenSSL, whose behaviour of the AES-256-GCM decryption function
changes between versions. The source code for ChaCha-Pol1305 is small and in
the public domain, and can therefore be easily included in tinc itself.
Moreover, it is very fast even without using any optimized assembler, easily
outperforming AES-256-GCM on platforms that don't have special AES instructions
in hardware.
This uses the portable Ed25519 library made by Orson Peters, which in turn uses
the reference implementation made by Daniel J. Bernstein.
This implementation also allows Ed25519 keys to be used for key exchange, so
there is no need to add a separate implementation of Curve25519.
- Try to prevent SIGPIPE from being sent for errors sending to the control
socket. We don't outright block the SIGPIPE signal because we still want the
tinc CLI to exit when its output is actually sent to a real (broken) pipe.
- Don't call exit() from top(), and properly detect when the control socket is
closed by the tincd.
Before, the tapreader thread would just exit immediately after encountering the
first error, without notifying the main thread. Now, the tapreader thead never
exits itself, but tells the main thread to stop when more than ten errors are
encountered in a row.
Before, when making a meta-connection to a node (either because of a ConnectTo
or because AutoConnect is set), tinc required one or more Address statements
in the corresponding host config file. However, tinc learns addresses from
other nodes that it uses for UDP connections. We can use those just as well for
TCP connections.
When creating invitations or using them to join a VPN, and the tinc command is
not run interactively (ie, when stdin and stdout are not connected or
redirected to/from a file), don't ask questions. If normally tinc would ask for
a confirmation, just assume the default answer instead. If tinc really needs
some input, just print an error message instead.
In case an invitation is used for a VPN which uses a netname that is already in
use on the local host, tinc will store the configuration in a temporary
directory. Normally it asks for an alternative netname and then renames the
temporary directory, but when not run interactively, it now just prints the
location of the unchanged temporary directory.
Testing multiple daemons connecting to each other on the same computer is
usually difficult, because connections to local IP addresses will bypass most
of the network stack. However, recent versions of Linux support network
namespaces, which can isolate network interfaces. We use this to isolate the
virtual interface of the daemons from each other, so we get the behaviour as if
the daemons were each running on their own machine. This can also be used for
more complicated tests (including those with firewall rules) without disturbing
the real network setup of the host computer.
ListenAddress works the same as BindToAddress, except that from now on,
explicitly binding outgoing packets to the address of a socket is only done for
sockets specified with BindToAddress.
If the Port statement is not used, there are two other ways to let tinc listen
on a non-default port: either by specifying one or more BindToAddress
statements including port numbers, or by starting it from systemd with socket
activation. Tinc announces its own port to other nodes, but before it only
announced what was set using the Port statement.
