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The data sent from one node to another doesn't pass through TS's infra.

I basically just see Tailscale as an auth paradigm for managing wireguard keys.




I don't really understand this though.. The key exchange is perhaps the most important aspect.

Just hypothetically, what if an intelligence service records your encrypted traffic and also happened to get AWS to mitm your communication with the tailscale key distribution server?

Doesn't really matter if most of your traffic doesn't use their infrastructure if the most important parts of it do.


If your threat model includes intelligence services and mitming AWS you should not be using tailscale, and you would hopefully already know that.


> Using Tailscale introduces a dependency on Tailscale’s security. Using WireGuard directly does not. It is important to note that a device’s private key never leaves the device and thus Tailscale cannot decrypt network traffic. Our client code is open source, so you can confirm that yourself.

https://tailscale.com/compare/wireguard

My understanding is that (in theory) the only way this is possible is if the attacker introduces a new node and then connected to other nodes that are in the tailnet. What you're suggesting is that a single node that is connected to the other nodes gets compromised, but this isn't possible without already being able to compromise that specific node. Alternatively, if someone hacks Tailscale itself, the only way they could get access to any nodes would be to add their own node, but if you have alerting set up you would know and you could shut down the attacker.




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