[grumbel]

That explanation still seems overly complicated. Iroh isn't a VPN. Iroh just lets apps connect to each other, just like plain old TCP, but without the shackles of NAT, DNS and dynamic IP addresses that made that impossible. It's restoring simple P2P connectivity to the Internet.

[worldsayshi]

Also, all connections in iroh are end-to-end encrypted.

[HappMacDonald]

That.. makes it sound to me a lot like a VPN though

[tecleandor]

That would make SSH look like a VPN ;)

[Perepiska]

And bypass all the firewalls if secret key of target machine is known?

[rklaehn]

You only need to know the public key of the target endpoint.

It will work even on very restrictive firewalls. Even if they outright ban UDP packets, we will fall back to the relay connection which is https/websocket.

Note that here is not a single keypair per machine, but per endpoint. You can have multiple endpoints on one machine.