wrap up tails#21189 and document management of VPN by NetworkManager authored by boyska's avatar boyska
...@@ -265,3 +265,28 @@ About which sajolida commented: ...@@ -265,3 +265,28 @@ About which sajolida commented:
Next step: spend another few hours checking how hard it would be to avoid Next step: spend another few hours checking how hard it would be to avoid
routing tor nor the Unsafe Browser over the VPN. routing tor nor the Unsafe Browser over the VPN.
### VPN Browser + NetworkManager (tails#21189)
The goal here is to have a VPN managed by NetworkManager, but which is only used by the VPN Browser. It's not
a strict requirement that the UI is the "stock" one.
The exploration of this option has not been conclusive: we could not make a working Proof of Concept, although
this doesn't sound like an impossible task. If we want to follow this route, it might be better to delegate
this sort of work to someone who is better at policy routing. TPA might have the skills we are looking for.
The exploration has been done on Wireguard only, on the idea that it is the more modern VPN option. Given the
many differnces between Wireguard and OpenVPN, it's hard to generalize the findings. No analysis has been done
on whether OpenVPN was ok.
Having a constraint to use NetworkManager actually prevents us from using
[some](https://www.wireguard.com/netns/) of the [otherwise
available](https://www.procustodibus.com/blog/2023/04/wireguard-netns-for-specific-apps/#enable-selectively)
and relevant techniques.
The UI that enables the loading of a configuration file such as the one supplied to users by Mullvad is very
good! But if we decide to use the NetworkManager UI, we need to consider that it exposes many possible
settings, so a user might shoot themself in the foot. As an example, the _Use this connection only for
resources on its network_ in the IPv4 panel is particularly important, and very visible to users. This would
be solved by having our own UI.