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The New Internet

(tailscale.com)
517 points ingve | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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teddyh ◴[] No.41084227[source]
The eternal problem with companies like Tailscale (and Cloudflare, Google, etc. etc.) is that, by solving a problem with the modern internet which the internet should have been designed to solve by itself, like simple end-to-end secure connectivity, Tailscale becomes incentivized to keep the problem. What the internet would need is something like IPv6 with automatic encryption via IPsec, with PKI provided by DNSSEC. But Tailscale has every incentive to prevent such things to be widely and compatibly implemented, because it would destroy their business. Their whole business depends on the problem persisting.

(Repost of <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38570370>)

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tomjen3 ◴[] No.41085987[source]
I think that is excessively negative take. Tailscales value proposition is also "you can connect to your network wherever you are, safely, and others cannot". That does not go away because of IPsec.
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teddyh ◴[] No.41086095[source]
Network- and location-based security is ultimately unworkable. It’s like if you, in order to work, had to go to a ”virtual office” to even send mail to your colleagues. Mail, and related internet-enabled services, should be accessible from anywhere, and be secured at the end points, not at the network layer. (Most attacks are internal, anyway.)
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1. PLG88 ◴[] No.41099063[source]
secured at the endpoints yes... I would argue you can go one step further, doing it at the application level. This is what we built (and open sourced) with OpenZiti (https://openziti.io/), the ability to embed an overlay network, built on zero trust and deny by default principles, directly into the app as part of the SDLC.

If you do this, your application has no listening ports on the WAN, LAN, or host OS network and thus cannot be attacked from the external network/IP.

The asymmetry of risk now favours the defender, not attacker. Oh, plus we also have pre-built tunnelers for endpoints if you cannot do app embedded.