Using SSL/TLS

etherws supports SSL/TLS connection. Tunnels will be encrypted and server will be verified by using following options.

On server side:

# etherws sw --sslkey ssl.key --sslcert ssl.crt

ssl.key is a server private key, and ssl.crt is a server certificate.

On client side:

# etherws ctl addport client --cacerts ssl.crt wss://10.0.0.10/

URL scheme was just changed to wss, and CA certificate to verify server certificate was specified.

Client verifies server certificate by default. So, for example, addport will fail if your server uses self-signed certificate and client uses another CA certificate.

If you want to just encrypt tunnels and do not need to verify server certificate, then you can use --insecure option:

# etherws ctl addport client --insecure wss://10.0.0.10/

Note: see http://docs.python.org/library/ssl.html for more information about certificates.

Client Authentication

etherws supports HTTP Basic Authentication. This means you can use etherws as simple L2-VPN server/client.

On server side, etherws requires user informations in Apache htpasswd format (and currently supports SHA-1 digest only). To create this file:

# htpasswd -s -c filename username

If you do not have htpasswd command, then you can use python one-liner instead:

# python -c 'import hashlib; print("username:{SHA}" + hashlib.sha1("password").digest().encode("base64"))'

To run server with this file:

# etherws sw --htpasswd filename

On client side, etherws requires username and password from option with addport command:

# etherws ctl addport client --user username --passwd password ws://10.0.0.10/

Or, password can be input from stdin:

# etherws ctl addport client --user username ws://10.0.0.10/
Client Password:

If authentication did not succeed, then addport will fail.

Note that you should not use HTTP Basic Authentication without SSL/TLS support, because this is insecure in itself.

Remote Control

etherws ctl controls etherws sw by JSON-RPC over HTTP. This means you can control etherws sw from remote nodes. However, allowing remote control without careful consideration also allows to attack to your server or network. So control URL is bound to localhost by default.

If you just want to allow remote control, you can use following options for example:

# etherws sw --ctlhost 10.0.0.10 --ctlport 1234

This means allowing remote control from any nodes that can access 10.0.0.10:1234 TCP/IP. Of course this is very dangerous as described above.

Here, etherws ctl can control remote etherws sw using following option:

# etherws ctl --ctlurl http://10.0.0.10:1234/ctl ...

etherws sw controller supports SSL/TLS connection and client authentication as well as WebSocket tunnel service.

On server side:

# etherws sw --ctlhost 10.0.0.10 --ctlport 443 \
             --ctlhtpasswd htpasswd --ctlsslkey ssl.key --ctlsslcert ssl.crt

On client side:

# etherws ctl --ctlurl https://10.0.0.10/ctl \
              --ctluser username --ctlpasswd password ...

Password can be input from stdin as well as WebSocket tunnel creation.

Virtual Machines Connection

For example, consider creating following virtual machine network:

+------------------+             +------------------+
| HypervisorA      |             |      HypervisorB |
|  +-----+         |             |         +-----+  |
|  | VM  |         |             |         | VM  |  |
|  +--+--+         |             |         +--+--+  |
|  (vnet0)         |             |         (vnet0)  |
|     |            |             |            |     |
| [etherws] (eth0) |             | (eth0) [etherws] |
+----||--------+---+             +----+-------||----+
     ||        |                      |       ||
     ||   -----+--------- // ---------+-----  ||
     ||           (Physical Network)          ||
     ||                                       ||
     ``=======================================''
                 (WebSocket Tunnel)

Existing network interfaces can also be added to etherws sw. So in this case, this will be created by following commands.

on HypervisorA:

# etherws sw
# etherws ctl addport netdev vnet0

on HypervisorB:

# etherws sw
# etherws ctl addport netdev vnet0
# etherws ctl addport client ws://HypervisorA/

Of course, you can create the TAP port and connect these using the Linux Bridge or the like.