Welcome to the Hyprspace Discussion Forum!

[alecbcs]

👋 Hello and Welcome!

Please feel free to:

• Ask questions you’re wondering about.
• Share ideas.
• Engage with other community members.
• Welcome others and are open-minded. Remember that this is a community we
  build together 💪.

[Winterhuman]

Does hyprspace use Wireguard as the underlying VPN once two peers find each other or is it a separate VPN implementation all together?

[alecbcs]

This is a great question! So Hyprspace doesn't use Wireguard. We use LibP2P to setup the connections between peers but LibP2P uses an authentication/public-private key encryption system that is very near identical to what is used in Wireguard. I tested out using Wireguard for Hyprspace originally but found that the performance of the wireguard-go was less than using straight encrypted libp2p.

[Winterhuman]

Hyprspace performance was actually better than Wireguard? Wow, well I guess that addresses performance concerns compared to existing VPN solutions!

[alecbcs]

Wireguard built into the Linux Kernel is still definitely faster than Hyprspace. But for userspace implementations written in Go I've been really happy with Hyprspace pulling out almost 500Mbps between my laptop and development server which was much faster than wireguard-go in my testing.

[Winterhuman]

Another question I thought of while reading about pcp, does hyprspace only accept ipv4 when giving peers ip-addresses? Does the initial connection between two devices use ipv6 first with ipv4 as a fallback?

[alecbcs]

This is a good question! I believe that externally between peers their IPs can be either IPv4 or IPv6. In the case that both are present, I believe libp2p will actually publish that the node is available on both and it's up to the other clients which to choose/they support.

[Winterhuman]

Quick question, how can I use hyprspace to forward traffic from one peer to another? let's say the following is the case:

(Peer-A on Network A) and (Peer-B on Network B)

I connect the two peers via hyprspace, how would I forward the vpn connection so that Peer-A will have some or all of it's traffic forwarded to Peer-B/Network-B?

[alecbcs]

@mrbluecoat hahaha at some level we're all n00bs so no worries! Just so that I can understand your use case better are you wanting to forward requests from the VPS to your home Peer-A? Or you want to be able to forward your traffic from Peer-A out of the VPS like a traditional VPN service?

[mrbluecoat]

I figured I'd start with the more traditional use case of a public VPS as an exit node like a traditional VPN and then if that worked try the more unusual use case of externally tunneling into my home network and using it as an exit node (for edge cases like watching Netflix when traveling abroad)

[mrbluecoat]

For the traditional VPN scenario, here's the basic flow:
Client running hyprspace on a home network behind a NAT requests example.com > Server running hyprspace as a transparent proxy and peered with client receives the request and does a GET example.com on behalf of client > GET result sent back to client

[mrbluecoat]

Maybe I'm just confusing TUN and TAP and this is the wrong tool for this use case.

[mrbluecoat]

For anyone coming across this thread, it turns out iptables was only half the solution. I needed a transparent forward proxy to complete my use case.