So I’ve been playing this morning with an open source peer-to-peer VPN system, based on wireguard, called TailScale that would be an idea addition to RTKBase. Several people have commented about security issues with NTRIPv1 protocol not being encrypted, and privacy implications of data on rtk2go. TailScale solves all this quite nicely, and eliminates the need to use rtk2go at all, provided you RTKBase can be its own local ntrip caster. Just have your phone or the AOG tablet connect to your VPN and get the NTRIP connection directly.
TailScale is the VPN solution I’ve been waiting years for. I say that having run my own OpenVPN network for decades. It’s peer-to-peer, meaning there is no central server, other than a coordinating server that helps the nodes find each other and their public keys. The actual vpn traffic does not pass through TailScale’s servers at all. Traffic goes direct from computer to computer, thanks to UDP NAT traversal. Being peer to peer, if you had two devices on your tailscale vpn who happened to be on a local WLAN, they actually wouldn’t send any traffic over the internet, but direct to each other.
Wireguard (well-known open source) is used to secure and authenticate these connections using public key encryption. TailScale hides away the complexity of key management, making it fast and easy to set up. Tailscale passes the public version of those keys to all your participating nodes. Tailscale never sees your devices’ generated private keys.
I sound like an advertisement. haha. I am super impressed. I’ve never seen any VPN of this nature that was as easy to set up and manage as this. Adding nodes does not require any passwords to be entered or stored on the devices; instead nodes generate an encryption key and a one-time URL that you enter into the browser to register the node. If RTKBase shipped with TailScale, there’d have to be just a couple of minor manual steps on the command line to register it with your network.
There are clients for Android and iOS in their respective stores, and clients for Linux, Windows, and Mac.