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TrustTunnel: AdGuard VPN protocol goes open-source(adguard-vpn.com)
74 points by kumrayu 10 hours ago | 18 comments
  • mrbluecoatan hour ago

    Very cool! Thanks for supporting open source (unlike a half-hearted attempt, like ExpressVPN's Lightway). Quick question: the website animated gif has no arrows from the website to the VPN server. Am I missing something?

    Update: just followed the quickstart and worked great; speed is virtually line speed - impressive!

  • stefanha4 hours ago

    Link to the protocol specification: https://github.com/TrustTunnel/TrustTunnel/blob/master/PROTO...

    It's a thin HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 tunneling protocol for TCP, UDP, and ICMP traffic.

    It should be easy to write an independent implementation based on this specification provided you already have an HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 library. Pretty neat!

  • ameshkov5 hours ago

    Hi, I’m one of the people working on this.

    One clarification that may not be obvious: open-sourcing this isn’t primarily about signaling or auditability. If that were the goal, a standalone protocol spec or a minimal reference repo would have been enough.

    Instead, we’re deliberately shipping full client and server implementations because the end goal is for this to become an independent, vendor-neutral project, not something tied to AdGuard.

    We want it to be usable by any VPN or proxy stack and, over time, to serve as a common baseline for stealthy transports — similar to the role xray/vless play today.

    Happy to answer questions or clarify design choices.

    • rfv67232 hours ago |parent

      Does your team have Chinese memebers?

      GFW has been able to filter SNI to block https traffic for a few years now.

      • gruez31 minutes ago |parent

        >GFW has been able to filter SNI to block https traffic for a few years now.

        SNI isn't really the threat here, because any commercial VPN is going to be blocked by IP, no need for SNI. The bigger threat is tell-tale patterns of VPN use because of TLS-in-TLS, TLS-in-SSH, or even TLS-in-any-high-entropy-stream (eg. shadowsocks).

        • rfv67234 minutes ago |parent

          > because any commercial VPN is going to be blocked by IP, no need for SNI.

          Proxy server can hide behind CDN like Cloudflare via websocket tunnel.

          This is why GFW develops SNI filter, Cloudflare is too big to block.

    • vitorsr4 hours ago |parent

      Thanks for all impressive work on AdGuard.

      Any particular reason to adopt Rust for this project instead of Go as many of your other products?

      Because I think since you have quite extensive Go codebase I would imagine you had to rewrite possibly a significant amount of code.

      • rcoder3 hours ago |parent

        Likewise interested in the authoritative answer, but: if I needed to write a decent chunk of code that had to run as close to wire/CPU limits as possible and run across popular mobile and desktop platforms I would 100% reach for Rust.

        Go has a lot of strengths, but embedding performance-critical code as a shared library in a mobile app isn't among them.

  • denkmoon4 hours ago

    What makes this worth using over something like vless? Work blocked my gatcha game so I've had to set up a xray/vless/xhttp/tls proxy and it works flawlessly. Gets through the corp firewall unscathed at full bandwidth and no appreciable increase in latency.

    • subscribed2 hours ago |parent

      Could you please drop names/links to the magic sauce if there's anything more than the names mentioned?

      I need to open ssh myself and for now I decided on tunnelling over http/3 terminated somewhere in aws/gcp/cf, but maybe your method is better.

      • dfadsadsf44 minutes ago |parent

        Just use Amnezia VPN - it can masquerade as https.

  • zx80805 hours ago

    I'm surprised that the browser extension to block ads has a proprietary vpn-like protocol. WTF?

    • ameshkov4 hours ago |parent

      One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that AdGuard means different things in different parts of the world. In some places, people know us primarily as an ad blocker, in others we’re best known for our DNS service and in some regions AdGuard is associated almost exclusively with our VPN. The reality is that AdGuard makes several different products, not just one.

      • 0x1ch2 hours ago |parent

        I'm an American. I knew about the VPN service, but mostly associate your brand with the DNS services and lists you provide (thank you!).

    • jabroni_salad4 hours ago |parent

      One of my first experiences with adguard was using it to block ads on an unrooted phone. It pipes your connection through a local vpn to do it.

  • sillyfluke6 hours ago

    It would be also nice if they could hold their implicit promise of having the AdGuard extension working on Safari iOS, it's broken for me even when I reinstal it. Anyone else have the same problem?

    • ameshkov5 hours ago |parent

      This is not a common issue tbh. What sometimes may happen is that after an iOS update the content blockers in Safari becomes corrupted and the only thing that fixes it is not just a reinstall, but uninstall + reboot + reinstall after that. If even this doesn’t help please contact me at “am at adguard.com”, I will try to help.

      • sillyfluke5 hours ago |parent

        Thanks for the suggestion! I'll definitely try the uninstall-reboot-reinstall flow. I was about to switch browsers on all the elderly devices.