Tailcat: Secure Tunnels in Seconds Without Tailscale's Control Plane
Tailcat: Secure Tunnels in Seconds (Tailscale)
Tailscale has released Tailcat, an open-source tool that reuses its encrypted data plane (WireGuard, magicsock, DERP) to create point-to-point tunnels without needing a Tailscale account or control plane. It works like netcat: one side runs a server and gets a short token, the other side uses it to connect, with end-to-end encryption and automatic NAT traversal. It can pipe stdin/stdout, expose local ports, run an auth-free SSH server, and more, all in userspace without root.
All traffic between the two is encrypted end-to-end with WireGuard.
- bradfitz
One fun use case: a coworker just whipped up this Minecraft mod using tailcat as its transport: https://github.com/tailscale/tailcat-for-minecraft
(just a cute demo, not intended for release or ongoing maintenance)
- megamorf
So this is somewhat similar to Iroh?
- mikepurvis
I enjoy that they supply a nix install/environment, similar to the main tailscale/tailscale repo. Is nix widespread or the standard dev environment at tailscale, or is it like a 10% option and most people just use Docker or whatever?
- spockz
How much Tailscale is this still if the transport is based on wireguard, the control plane is something new with the keys based on the wireguard keys? Genuinely confused.
- pbohun
This is so cool! I mean, we really wouldn't need it if we had 100% ipv6 (no cgnat), but this is the next best thing. I think people underestimate the innovation that could happen if we had trivial p2p.