smegmesh

Overview

Distributed WireGuard mesh management. This tool helps to configure WireGuard networks in a mesh topology such that there is no single point of failure. The tool aims to set-up mesh networks with minimal knowledge and configuration of WireGuard.

The idea being that a node can take up one of two roles in the network, a peer or a client. A peer is publicly accessible and must have IPv6 forwarding enabled. Peer's responsibility is routing traffic on behalf of clients associated with it.

Whereas, a client hides behind a private endpoint in which all packets are routed through the peer. A client must enable the flat keepAliveWg to ensure that its associated peer learns about any NAT mappings that change.

IPv6 is used in the overlay to make use of the larger address space. A node hashes it's WireGuard public key to create an identifier (the last 64-bits of the IPv6 address) and the mesh-id is hashed into the first 64-bits of the IPv6 address to create the locator.

A node (both client and a peer) can be in multiple meshes at the same time. In which case the node can optionally choose to act as a bridge and forward packets between the two meshes. Through this it is possible to define complex topologies. To route between meshes multiple hops away a simple link-state protocol is adopted (similar to RIP) in which the path length (number of meshes) is used to determine the shortest path.

Redundant routing is possible to create multiple exit points to the same mesh network. In which case consistent hashing is performed to split traffic between the exit points.

Scalability

The prototype has been tested to a scale of 3000 peers.

Installation

To build the project do: go build -v ./.... A Docker file is provided to get started.

To build with the Dockerfile: docker build -t smegmesh-base ./

Then run an example topology in the examples folder. For example: cd examples/simple && docker-compose up -d

Tools

Smegd

Smegmesh requires the daemon process to be running (smegd) which also takes a configuration.yaml file. An example yaml configuration file is provided in examples/simple/shared/configuration.

Smegctl

Smegctl is a CLI tool to create, join, visualise and administer networks.

Api

An api is provided to invoke functions to create, join, visualise and administer networks. This could be used to create an application that allows a user to configure the networks.

Dns

A dns server is provided to resolve an alias into an IPv6 address.