Very cool! Thanks for supporting open source (unlike a half-hearted attempt, like ExpressVPN's Lightway). Quick question: the website animated gif has no arrows from the website to the VPN server. Am I missing something?
Update: just followed the quickstart and worked great; speed is virtually line speed - impressive!
Link to the protocol specification: https://github.com/TrustTunnel/TrustTunnel/blob/master/PROTO...
It's a thin HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 tunneling protocol for TCP, UDP, and ICMP traffic.
It should be easy to write an independent implementation based on this specification provided you already have an HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 library. Pretty neat!
Looks very similar to the HBONE protocol the istio folks created for ambient mesh: https://istio.io/latest/docs/ambient/architecture/hbone/
Basically a CONNECT proxy? That's definitely not a difficult thing to write.
More or less, built on top of it with added udp/icmp.
When writing server and client a lot of time is consumed by additional features, not on implementing the spec itself. For instance, in order to be truly stealthy we have to make sure that it looks *exactly* like Chromium on the outside, and then maintain this similarity as Chromium changes TLS implementation from version to version. Or here’s another example: on the server-side we need to have an anti-probing protection to make it harder to detect what the server does.
QUIC CONNECT supports UDP too now.
We support both H2 and H3 and this is necessary. QUIC is not bad, but there are places where it either does not work at all or works too slow.
And one more thing, even though the code and spec is only published now, we’ve been using TrustTunnel for a long time, started before CONNECT_UDP became a thing.
We’re considering switching to it though (or having an option to use it) just to make the server compatible with more clients.
Hi, I’m one of the people working on this.
One clarification that may not be obvious: open-sourcing this isn’t primarily about signaling or auditability. If that were the goal, a standalone protocol spec or a minimal reference repo would have been enough.
Instead, we’re deliberately shipping full client and server implementations because the end goal is for this to become an independent, vendor-neutral project, not something tied to AdGuard.
We want it to be usable by any VPN or proxy stack and, over time, to serve as a common baseline for stealthy transports — similar to the role xray/vless play today.
Happy to answer questions or clarify design choices.
Does your team have Chinese memebers?
GFW has been able to filter SNI to block https traffic for a few years now.
We do, and from what we know a bigger problem in China is detecting traffic patterns. SNI filtering is not that big of a deal, in order to block your domain it needs to first learn which one you’re using. What for the traffic patterns, people in China prefer to selectively route traffic to the tunnel. For instance, the client apps allow you to route *.cn domains (or any other domains) directly. It makes it harder to detect that you’re using a VPN.
How do you do this on iOS?
You mean in TrustTunnel apps? You can create a routing profile there and select which domains/ips are bypassed, and then select that routing profile in the vpn connection settings.
>GFW has been able to filter SNI to block https traffic for a few years now.
SNI isn't really the threat here, because any commercial VPN is going to be blocked by IP, no need for SNI. The bigger threat is tell-tale patterns of VPN use because of TLS-in-TLS, TLS-in-SSH, or even TLS-in-any-high-entropy-stream (eg. shadowsocks).
> because any commercial VPN is going to be blocked by IP, no need for SNI.
Proxy server can hide behind CDN like Cloudflare via websocket tunnel.
This is why GFW develops SNI filter, Cloudflare is too big to block.
CDN traffic is quite expensive, don’t believe it would be feasible to provide a VPN product for that. But for individuals, sure.
>Proxy server can hide behind CDN like Cloudflare via websocket tunnel.
cloudflare doesn't support domain fronting so any SNI spoofing won't work.
Thanks for all impressive work on AdGuard.
Any particular reason to adopt Rust for this project instead of Go as many of your other products?
Because I think since you have quite extensive Go codebase I would imagine you had to rewrite possibly a significant amount of code.
Embedding Go code into other binaries sucks ass. Debugging is worse, it installs some signal handlers.
Performance reasons aside, TrustTunnel is developed by the team whose main language is C++ (and the client library is actually written in C++) so Rust was a more natural choice for them.
Likewise interested in the authoritative answer, but: if I needed to write a decent chunk of code that had to run as close to wire/CPU limits as possible and run across popular mobile and desktop platforms I would 100% reach for Rust.
Go has a lot of strengths, but embedding performance-critical code as a shared library in a mobile app isn't among them.
What makes this worth using over something like vless? Work blocked my gatcha game so I've had to set up a xray/vless/xhttp/tls proxy and it works flawlessly. Gets through the corp firewall unscathed at full bandwidth and no appreciable increase in latency.
Could you please drop names/links to the magic sauce if there's anything more than the names mentioned?
I need to open ssh myself and for now I decided on tunnelling over http/3 terminated somewhere in aws/gcp/cf, but maybe your method is better.
Just use Amnezia VPN - it can masquerade as https.
I can't, my endpoint runs software enforcing compliance. "no disallowed VPN software" is one of the rules.
Besides, where's fun in it :)
Super cool stuff! Excited to see what p2p between clients might look like, and how it compares on speed with Wireguard.
Does it support the mwss protocol?
How does this compare to Obscura
Obscura is WireGuard-over-QUIC, not a new protocol.
I'm surprised that the browser extension to block ads has a proprietary vpn-like protocol. WTF?
One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that AdGuard means different things in different parts of the world. In some places, people know us primarily as an ad blocker, in others we’re best known for our DNS service and in some regions AdGuard is associated almost exclusively with our VPN. The reality is that AdGuard makes several different products, not just one.
I'm an American. I knew about the VPN service, but mostly associate your brand with the DNS services and lists you provide (thank you!).
And AdGuard Home is a wonderful alternative to Pi-hole :)
Yay, thank you! :)
I wish we finish with redesigning it nicely this year and finally after all those years we will finally call it v1.0
Wow! Am I about to live to see the day?! I've been following the releases fairly closely, and looking forward to it.
One of my first experiences with adguard was using it to block ads on an unrooted phone. It pipes your connection through a local vpn to do it.
[dead]
It would be also nice if they could hold their implicit promise of having the AdGuard extension working on Safari iOS, it's broken for me even when I reinstal it. Anyone else have the same problem?
This is not a common issue tbh. What sometimes may happen is that after an iOS update the content blockers in Safari becomes corrupted and the only thing that fixes it is not just a reinstall, but uninstall + reboot + reinstall after that. If even this doesn’t help please contact me at “am at adguard.com”, I will try to help.
Thanks for the suggestion! I'll definitely try the uninstall-reboot-reinstall flow. I was about to switch browsers on all the elderly devices.