Provided by: netsniff-ng_0.6.8-2build1_amd64 bug

NAME

       curvetun - a lightweight curve25519 ip4/6 tunnel

SYNOPSIS

       curvetun [options]

DESCRIPTION

       curvetun  is a lightweight, high-speed ECDH multiuser IP tunnel for Linux that is based on
       epoll(2).  curvetun uses the Linux TUN/TAP interface and supports {IPv4, IPv6} over {IPv4,
       IPv6} with UDP or TCP as carrier protocols.

       It has an integrated packet forwarding tree, thus multiple users with different IPs can be
       handled via a single tunnel device on  the  server  side,  and  flows  are  scheduled  for
       processing in a CPU efficient way, at least in the case of TCP as the carrier protocol.

       For  key management, public-key cryptography based on elliptic curves are used and packets
       are encrypted end-to-end by the symmetric stream cipher Salsa20 and authenticated  by  the
       MAC  Poly1305,  where  keys  have  previously  been  computed  with the ECDH key agreement
       protocol Curve25519.

       Cryptography is based on Daniel J. Bernstein's networking and cryptography library “NaCl”.
       By  design,  curvetun does not provide any particular pattern or default port numbers that
       gives certainty that the connection from a particular flow is actually running curvetun.

       However, if you have a further need to bypass censorship, you can try  using  curvetun  in
       combination with Tor's obfsproxy or Telex. Furthermore, curvetun also protects you against
       replay attacks and DH man-in-the-middle attacks.  Additionally, server-side  syslog  event
       logging can also be disabled to avoid revealing critical user connection data.

        1. obfsproxy from the TOR project
           https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy.html.en

        2. Telex, anti-censorship in the network infrastructure
           https://telex.cc/

OPTIONS

       -d <tundev>, --dev <tundev>
              Defines  the name of the tunnel device that is being created. If this option is not
              set,  then  the  default  names,  curves{0,1,2,..}  for  a  curvetun  server,   and
              curvec{0,1,2,...} for a curvetun client are used.

       -p <num>, --port <num>
              Defines the port the curvetun server should listen on. There is no default port for
              curvetun, so setting this option for server bootstrap is mandatory. This option  is
              for servers only.

       -t <server>, --stun <server>
              If  needed,  this options enables an STUN lookup in order to show public IP to port
              mapping and to punch a hole into the firewall. In case you  are  unsure  what  STUN
              server to use, simply use ''--stun stunserver.org''.

       -c[=alias], --client[=alias]
              Starts  curvetun  in client mode and connects to the given connection alias that is
              defined in the configuration file.

       -k, --keygen
              Generate private and public keypair. This must be done initially.

       -x, --export
              Export user and key combination to stdout as a one-liner.

       -C, --dumpc
              Dump all known clients that may connect to the local curvetun server and exit.

       -S, --dumps
              Dump all known servers curvetun as a client can connect to, and exit.

       -D, --nofork
              Do not fork off as a client or server on startup.

       -s, --server
              Start curvetun in server mode. Additional  parameters  are  needed,  at  least  the
              definition of the port that clients can connect to is required.

       -N, --no-logging
              Disable all curvetun logging of user information. This option can be used to enable
              curvetun users to connect more anonymously. This option is for servers only.

       -u, --udp
              Use UDP as a carrier protocol instead of  TCP.  By  default,  TCP  is  the  carrier
              protocol. This option is for servers only.

       -4, --ipv4
              Defines  IPv4  as  the underlying network protocol to be used on the tunnel device.
              IPv4 is the default. This option is for servers only.

       -6, --ipv6
              Defines IPv6 as the underlying network protocol to be used on  the  tunnel  device.
              This option is for servers only.

       -v, --version
              Show version information and exit.

       -h, --help
              Show user help and exit.

USAGE EXAMPLE

       curvetun --server -4 -u -N --port 6666 --stun stunserver.org
              Starts curvetun in server mode with IPv4 as network protocol and UDP as a transport
              carrier protocol. The curvetun server listens for incoming connections on port 6666
              and performs an STUN lookup on startup to stunserver.org.

       curvetun --client=ethz
              Starts  curvetun  in  client  mode  and  connects  to  the defined connection alias
              ''ethz'' that is defined in the curvetun ~/.curvetun/servers configuration file.

       curvetun --keygen
              Generates initial keypairs and stores them in the ~/.curvetun/ directory.

       curvetun --export
              Export user data to stdout for configuration of a curvetun server.

CRYPTOGRAPHY

       Encrypted IP tunnels are often used to create virtual private networks (VPN), where  parts
       of  the  network  can  only  be  reached  via  an insecure or untrusted medium such as the
       Internet. Only a few software utilities exist  to  create  such  tunnels,  or,  VPNs.  Two
       popular representatives of such software are OpenVPN and VTUN.

       The  latter  also introduced the TUN/TAP interfaces into the Linux kernel. VTUN only has a
       rather basic encryption module, that does not fit today's cryptographic needs. By default,
       MD5 is used to create 128-Bit wide keys for the symmetric BlowFish cipher in ECB mode [1].

       Although  OpenSSL  is  used  in  both  VTUN and OpenVPN, OpenVPN is much more feature rich
       regarding ciphers and user authentication. Nevertheless, letting people choose ciphers  or
       authentication methods is not necessarily a good thing: administrators could either prefer
       speed over security and therefore choose weak ciphers, so that  the  communication  system
       will  be  as  good  as  without any cipher; they could choose weak passwords for symmetric
       encryption or they could misconfigure the communication system by having too  much  choice
       of ciphers and too little experience for picking the right one.

       Next   to   the  administration  issues,  there  are  also  software  development  issues.
       Cryptographic libraries like OpenSSL are a huge mess and  too  low-level  and  complex  to
       fully  understand or correctly apply, so that they form further ground for vulnerabilities
       of such software.

       In 2010, the cryptographers Tanja Lange and Daniel J. Bernstein have therefore created and
       published  a  cryptographic  library  for  networking,  which  is  named  NaCl (pronounced
       ''salt''). NaCl addresses such problems as mentioned in OpenSSL and, in  contrast  to  the
       rather generic use of OpenSSL, was created with a strong focus on public-key authenticated
       encryption based on elliptic curve cryptography, which  is  used  in  curvetun.  Partially
       quoting Daniel J.  Bernstein:

       "RSA is somewhat older than elliptic-curve cryptography: RSA was introduced in 1977, while
       elliptic-curve cryptography was introduced in 1985.  However,  RSA  has  shown  many  more
       weaknesses   than   elliptic-curve   cryptography.  RSA's  effective  security  level  was
       dramatically reduced by the linear sieve in the late 1970s, by the quadratic sieve and ECM
       in  the  1980s,  and by the number-field sieve in the 1990s. For comparison, a few attacks
       have been developed against some rare elliptic curves having special algebraic structures,
       and  the  amount  of  computer power available to attackers has predictably increased, but
       typical elliptic curves require just as  much  computer  power  to  break  today  as  they
       required twenty years ago.

       IEEE  P1363  standardized  elliptic-curve  cryptography  in  the  late  1990s, including a
       stringent list of security criteria for elliptic curves. NIST used the IEEE P1363 criteria
       to select fifteen specific elliptic curves at five different security levels. In 2005, NSA
       issued a new ''Suite B'' standard, recommending the NIST elliptic curves (at two  specific
       security  levels) for all public-key cryptography and withdrawing previous recommendations
       of RSA."

       curvetun uses a particular elliptic curve, Curve25519, introduced in the following  paper:
       Daniel  J.  Bernstein,  ''Curve25519: new Diffie-Hellman speed records,'' pages 207-228 in
       Proceedings of PKC 2006, edited by Moti Yung, Yevgeniy Dodis,  Aggelos  Kiayias,  and  Tal
       Malkin, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3958, Springer, 2006, ISBN 3-540-33851-9.

       This  elliptic  curve  follows  all of the standard IEEE P1363 security criteria.  It also
       follows new recommendations that achieve ''side-channel immunity'' and ''twist  security''
       while  improving  speed.  What this means is that secure implementations of Curve25519 are
       considerably simpler and faster than secure implementations of, for example,  NIST  P-256;
       there  are fewer opportunities for implementors to make mistakes that compromise security,
       and mistakes are more easily caught by reviewers.

       An attacker who spends a billion dollars on special-purpose chips  to  attack  Curve25519,
       using the best attacks available today, has about 1 chance in 1000000000000000000000000000
       of breaking Curve25519 after a year of computation.  One could achieve similar  levels  of
       security  with  3000-bit  RSA, but encryption and authentication with 3000-bit RSA are not
       nearly fast enough to handle tunnel traffic and would require much more space  in  network
       packets.

        1. Security analysis of VTun
           http://www.off.net/~jme/vtun_secu.html

        2. NaCl: Networking and Cryptography library
           http://nacl.cr.yp.to/

SETUP HOWTO

       If you have not run curvetun before, you need to do an initial setup once.

       First, make sure that the servers and clients clocks are periodically synced, for example,
       by running an NTP daemon. This is necessary to protect against replay attacks. Also,  make
       sure  you have read and write access to /dev/net/tun. You should not run curvetun as root!
       Then, after you have assured this, the first step is to generate keys and config files. On
       both the client and server do:

       curvetun -k

       You  are  asked for a user name. You can use an email address or whatever suits you. Here,
       we assume you have entered 'mysrv1' on the server and 'myclient1' on the client side.

       Now, all necessary files have been created under ~/.curvetun.  Files  include  “priv.key”,
       “pub.key”, “username”, “clients” and “servers”.

       “clients”  and  “servers”  are empty at the beginning and need to be filled. The “clients”
       file is meant for the server, so that it knows what clients are allowed  to  connect.  The
       “servers” file is for the client, where it can select curvetun servers to connect to. Both
       files are kept very simple, so that a single configuration line per client  or  server  is
       sufficient.

       The client needs to export its public key data for the server

       curvetun -x

       where it prints a string in the following format:

         myclient1;11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11
         \_______/
       \_____________________________________________________________________________________________/
          username  32 byte public key for 'myclient1'

       This line is transferred to the server admin (yes, we assume a manual on-site key exchange
       scenario  where,  for example, the admin sets up server and clients), where the admin then
       adds this entry into his ''clients'' file like:

         server$ echo "myclient1;11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:" \
                      "11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11:11" >> ~/.curvetun/clients

       The server admin can check if the server has registered it properly as follows:

         server$ curvetun -C

       which prints all parsed clients from ''~/.curvetun/clients''. This process could easily be
       automated or scripted with, for example, Perl and LDAP.

       Now,  the  client  ''myclient1''  is  known  to  the  server;  that  completes  the server
       configuration. The next step is to tell the client  where  it  needs  to  connect  to  the
       server.

       We  assume  in  this example that the tunnel server has a public IP address, e.g. 1.2.3.4,
       runs on port 6666 and uses UDP as a carrier protocol. In case you are behind NAT, you  can
       use curvetun's ''--stun'' option for starting the server, to obtain your mapping. However,
       in this example we continue with 1.2.3.4 and 6666, UDP.

       First, the server needs to export its key to the client, as follows:

         server$ curvetun -x

       where it prints a string in the following format:

         mysrv1;22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22
         \____/
       \_____________________________________________________________________________________________/
        username  32 byte public key for 'mysrv1'
                  ^-- you need this public key

       Thus,  you  now have the server IP address, server port, server transport protocol and the
       server's public key at hand. On the client side it can be put all together in  the  config
       as follows:

         client$ echo "myfirstserver;1.2.3.4;6666;udp;22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:" \
                      "22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:22:"  \
                      "22:22" >> ~/.curvetun/servers

       The client can check its config using:

         client$ curvetun -S

       Then we start the server with:

         server$ curvetun -s -p 6666 -u
         server# ifconfig curves0 up
         server# ifconfig curves0 10.0.0.1/24

       Then, we start the client with:

         client$ curvetun -c=myfirstserver
         client# ifconfig curvec0 up
         client# ifconfig curvec0 10.0.0.2/24

       Also, client-side information, errors, or warnings will appear in syslog! By now we should
       be able to ping the server:

         client$ ping 10.0.0.1

       That's it! Routing example:

       Server side's public IP on eth0 is, for example, 1.2.3.4:

         server$ ... start curvetun server ...
         server# ifconfig curves0 up
         server# ifconfig curves0 10.0.0.1/24
         server# echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
         server# iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
         server# iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o curves0 -m state --state  RELATED,ESTABLISHED  -j
       ACCEPT
         server# iptables -A FORWARD -i curves0 -o eth0 -j ACCEPT

       Client side's IP on eth0 is, for example, 5.6.7.8:

         client$ ... start curvetun client ...
         client# ... lookup your default gateway (e.g. via route, here: 5.6.7.9) ...
         client# ifconfig curvec0 up
         client# ifconfig curvec0 10.0.0.2/24
         client# route add -net 1.2.3.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gw 5.6.7.9 dev eth0
         client# route add default gw 10.0.0.1
         client# route del default gw 5.6.7.9

       That should be it, happy browsing and emailing via curvetun tunnels!

NOTE

       This  software  is an experimental prototype intended for researchers. It will most likely
       mature over time, but it is currently not advised to use this software when life is put at
       risk.

BUGS

       Blackhole tunneling is currently not supported.

LEGAL

       curvetun is licensed under the GNU GPL version 2.0.

HISTORY

       curvetun  was  originally  written  for  the netsniff-ng toolkit by Daniel Borkmann. It is
       currently  maintained  by  Tobias  Klauser  <tklauser@distanz.ch>  and   Daniel   Borkmann
       <dborkma@tik.ee.ethz.ch>.

SEE ALSO

       netsniff-ng(8), trafgen(8), mausezahn(8), bpfc(8), ifpps(8), flowtop(8), astraceroute(8)

AUTHOR

       Manpage was written by Daniel Borkmann.

COLOPHON

       This  page is part of the Linux netsniff-ng toolkit project. A description of the project,
       and information about reporting bugs, can be found at http://netsniff-ng.org/.