vula: automatic local network encryption

With zero configuration, vula automatically encrypts IP communication between hosts on a local area network in a forward-secret and transitionally post-quantum manner to protect against passive eavesdropping.

With manual key verification and/or automatic key pinning and manual resolution of IP or hostname conflicts, vula will additionally protect against interception by active adversaries.

When the local gateway to the internet is also vula peer, internet-destined traffic will also be encrypted on the LAN.

How does it work?

Automatically.

Vula combines WireGuard for forward-secret point-to-point tunnels with mDNS and DNS-SD for local service announcements, and enhances the confidentiality of WireGuard tunnels by using CTIDH implemented by highctidh, a post-quantum non-interactive key exchange primitive, to generate a peer-wise pre-shared key for each tunnel configuration.

Vula's advantages over some other solutions include:

• design is absent of single points of failure (SPOFs)
• uses existing IP addresses inside and outside of the tunnels, allowing seamless integration into existing LAN environments using DHCP and/or manual addressing
• avoids needing to attempt handshakes with non-participating hosts
• does not require any configuration to disrupt passive surveillance adversaries
• simple verification with QR codes to disrupt active surveillance adversaries

See NOTES.md for some discussion of the threat model and other technical details, and COMPARISON.md for a comparison of Vula to some related projects.

Current status

Vula is functional today, although it has some known issues documented in STATUS.md. It is ready for daily use by people who are proficient with Linux networking and the command line, but we do not yet recommend it for people who are not.

See INSTALL.md for installation and usage instructions.

See HACKING.md for some tips on opening the hood.

See DEPENDENCY.md for diagrams illustrating the different dependecy relationships between internal and external python modules.

Security contact

We consider this project to currently be alpha pre-release, experimental, research quality code. It is not yet suitable for widespread deployment. It has not yet been audited by an independent third party and it should be treated with caution.

If you or someone you know finds a security issue - please open an issue or feel free to send an email to security at vula dot link.

Our current bug bounty for security issues is humble. We will treat qualifying reporters to a beverage after the COVID-19 crisis has ended; ojalá. Locations limited to qualifying CCC events such as the yearly Congress.

Authors

The authors of vula are anonymous for now, while our paper is undergoing peer review.

Acknowledgements

OPERATION_VULA.md has some history about the name Vula.

Vula is not associated with or endorsed by the WireGuard project. WireGuard is a registered trademark of Jason A. Donenfeld.

This project is funded through the NGI Assure Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet program. Learn more on the NLnet project page.