silvio

Silvio is a VPN-over-WebSocket implementation, based on the TUN interface. I am using it to connect all my devices to a single virtual network through a web service. According to Wikpiedia, Silvio (Pellico) was an Italian writer, poet, dramatist and patriot active in the Italian unification. I spent some time of my life on a street that was named after him.

Installation

The code is written in Crystal and uses PostgreSQL to store the information about the networks and clients You can build the server and the client using following command:

shards build

Usage

Server

The server requires an empty PostgreSQL database it can be started with the following command:

bin/silvio-server -d postgres://user:pass@host:port/db

The server by default listens on 0.0.0.0:8090, you can get more information about how to tweak this if you pass the --help argument. Defining clients and networks is possible through the REST API:

# POST /networks
{
  "name": "test-net",
  "address": "192.168.10.0",
  "netmask": "255.255.255.0"
}

# POST /networks/1/clients
{
  "name": "test-client",
  "address": "192.168.10.1"
}

Client

The client uses TUN as the virtual network interface so it needs to run as a privileged user. There are two required arguments, the URL pointing to the server and a unique token stored in the database:

bin/silvio-client ws://<host>:<port> <token>

Development

After cloning the repository, you can install the dependencies by running shards and bundle. There are no unit tests, if they become available you will be able to run them using crystal spec. There is a high-level test in spec/ping/test-server.sh that requires docker and tests if two clients can ping each other.

Contributing

1. Fork it (https://github.com/skateman/silvio/fork)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Here are some ideas for contributions:

• Storing IP addresses as numbers instead of strings
• Optional traffic routing to the Internet (SOCKS-like)
• Support for IPv6
• Authentication for the REST API
• Static frontend for the REST API
• Load-balancing between multiple instances
• Tests, tests and tests
• OpenShift template
• Support for Windows and OSX

License

This project is released under the MIT license.