Get the latest tech news

TCP over TCP is a bad idea (2000)

A frequently occurring idea for IP tunneling applications is to run a protocol like PPP, which encapsulates IP packets in a format suited for a stream transport (like a modem line), over a TCP-based connection. This would be an easy solution for encrypting tunnels by running PPP over SSH, for which several recommendations already exist (one in the Linux HOWTO base, one on my own website, and surely several others).

This would be an easy solution for encrypting tunnels by running PPP over SSH, for which several recommendations already exist (one in the Linux HOWTO base, one on my own website, and surely several others). The whole problem was the original incentive to start the CIPE project, because I used a PPP over SSH solution for some time and it proved to be fairly unusable. (The choice for UDP, instead of another IP-level protocol like IPsec does, is for several reasons: this allows to distinguish tunnels by their port number, and it adds the ability to run over SOCKS.)

Get the Android app