Tholian® Warps

Tholian® Warps is a proactive and adaptive Mesh Network Router.

It tries to automatically detect and bypass censorship and throttling measurements at all cost. Programmable routing, traffic compression, traffic scattering, dynamic encryption rotation and other features are part of this experimental research project.

The goal of this project is to find out how feasible common NAT breaking and firewall bypassing techniques are and whether they can be used to build a reliable mesh network that's based on a peer-to-peer architecture.

Network Architecture

1. A Warps tunnel instance needs a gateway or peer to access the internet.
2. All Warps instances use a local DomainCache and WebCache.
3. All Warps instances can modify network protocols and rotate encryption keys on-demand.
4. A Warps gateway or peer uses optimizers which optimize the web asset file sizes.
5. A Warps gateway or peer uses DNS over TLS to resolve relayed DNS queries.
6. A Warps peer instance can tunnel through another Warps gateway or peer instance.

How to use Tunnels and Gateways

The easiest way to use Warps is with running a Warps gateway on your own VPS that is connected to the internet, and a locally running Warps tunnel.

As a defaulted network protocol, it is best to use dns, as that usually works to bypass typical firewall setups. Alternative supported network protocols are documented in Protocols.go.

# On your VPS server
tholian-warps gateway --protocol=dns --port=1053;

# On your local machine
tholian-warps tunnel --protocol=dns --host=1.3.3.7 --port=1053;
curl -x localhost:8080 http://google.com;

How to use Peers

Warps can be used peer-to-peer and discover locally and globally running Warps gateway instances via multicast DNS-SD. This mode currently needs a Warps gateway or peer instance that is known among all peers, so that keys can be exchanged.

Note that a Warps peer instance can change network protocols on-demand, and that behavior is different from the tunnel mode which prevails the given initial network protocol.

# On your VPS server
tholian-warps gateway --protocol=dns --port=1053;

# On your local machine
tholian-warps peer --protocol=dns --host=1.3.3.7 --port=1053; # start a local peer, and exchange public keys
curl -x localhost:8080 http://google.com;

How to use Proxy Chains

Warps can be chained via multiple proxies, without a limit on how many network hops you want to the public internet. In this example, we are routing local web traffic through 3 instances before the traffic hits the clearnet.

# On your VPS server
tholian-warps gateway --protocol=dns --port=1053;

# On your second VPS server
tholian-warps peer --protocol=dns --host=1.3.3.7 --port=1053;

# On your third VPS server
tholian-warps peer --protocol=dns --host=1.3.3.8 --port=1053;

# On your local machine
# local -> 1.3.3.9 -> 1.3.3.8 -> 1.3.3.7 -> internet
tholian-warps tunnel --protocol=dns --host=1.3.3.9 --port=1053;
curl -x localhost:8080 http://google.com;

Usage

🚧 Highly Experimental at this point - Use at own risk! 🚧

bash build.sh;
sudo cp ./build/tholian-warps /usr/bin/tholian-warps;

# Show CLI usage help
tholian-warps;

License

AGPL3