[rainsford]

I'm not sure how to compare the risk and attack surface of traditional NATs and firewalls vs Tailscale's ACL code, but I'm not sure Tailscale is obviously the riskier choice there. I think more traditional network devices are more familiar and more of a known quantity, but there's a lot of janky, unpatched, legacy network devices out there without any of the security protections of modern operating systems and code.

It's also worth considering that exploitability of ACL code is just one factor in comparing the risk and Tailscale or similar solutions allow security conscious setups that are not possible (or at least much more difficult) otherwise. For example, the NAT and firewall traversal means you don't have to open any ports anywhere to offer a service within your Tailscale network. Done correctly, this means very little attack surface for a bad actor to gain access to that stray VM in the first place. You can also implement fairly complex ACL behavior that's effectively done on each endpoint without having to trust your network infrastructure at all, behavior that stays the same even if your laptop or other devices roam from network to network.

Not to say I believe Tailsclae is bulletproof or anything, but it does offer some interesting tradeoffs and it's not immediately obvious to me the risk is worse than legacy networks (arguably better), and you gain a lot of interesting features and convenience.

[miki123211]

And for whatever it's worth, Tailscale is written in a language that makes buffer overflow and memory corruption vulnerabilities extremely unlikely.