Drago

A flexible configuration manager for WireGuard networks

Drago is a flexible configuration manager for WireGuard networks which is designed to make it simple to configure network overlays spanning heterogeneous hosts distributed across different clouds and physical locations.

Features

• Single-binary, lightweight
• Encrypted node-to-node communication
• Support for multiple storage backends
• Dynamic network configuration
• Support for wireguard-go
• Automatic key rotation
• Extensible via REST API
• Slick management dashboard
• Automatic IP assignment

Status & Roadmap

We are preparing a new release, which includes significant refactoring, and a bunch of new functionalities targeting production environments. More specifically, we are focusing on:

• Replacing Postgres with Etcd as the primary storage backend. Etcd will be embedded in the Drago server, hence allowing operation in cluster mode;
• Implementing an ACL system for fine-grained access control heavily inspired on that provided by Hashicorp Nomad;
• Refactoring the client, more specifically the node registration and reconciliation mechanisms in order to make them more secure and robust;
• We're working on supporting plugins (for IP leasing, meshing, discovery, anomaly detection, as well for integrating with other tools we're developing). The idea is to move all non-core functionality to a plugin. As it requires a bit more work, this is probably not going to be ready in the next version, though;
• Improving the documentation;
• Improving test coverage.

Any feedback from the community is much appreciated, and so are feature requests.

Use cases

• Securely connect IoT devices
• Build your own cloud with RaspberryPIs
• Connect servers/services running on multiple cloud providers
• Manage access to sensitive services deployed to private hosts
• Expose development servers for debugging and demonstration purposes
• Secure home automation, SSH access, etc
• Establish secure VPNs for your company

Overview

WireGuard® is an extremely simple yet fast and modern VPN that utilizes state-of-the-art cryptography. It aims to be faster, simpler, leaner, and more useful than IPsec, while avoiding the massive headache. It intends to be considerably more performant than OpenVPN. WireGuard is designed as a general purpose VPN for running on embedded interfaces and super computers alike, fit for many different circumstances. Initially released for the Linux kernel, it is now cross-platform and widely deployable, being regarded as the most secure, easiest to use, and simplest VPN solution in the industry.

WireGuard presents several advantages over other VPN solutions, but it does not allow for the dynamic configuration of network parameters such as IP addresses and firewall rules.

Drago builds on top of WireGuard, allowing users to dynamically manage the configuration of their VPN networks, providing a unified control plane for overlays spanning from containers to virtual machines to IoT devices.

How it works

Drago follows a client-server paradigm, in which a centralized server provides multiple clients running alongside WireGuard with their desired state. The desired state is retrieved from the server in a periodic basis and applied to WireGuard running on each host. In other words, the Drago server works as a gateway for accessing network configurations safely stored in a database.

It exposes a comprehensive API through which these configurations can be retrieved and modified, implements authentication mechanisms to prevent unauthorized access, and serves a slick web UI to facilitate the process of managing and visualizing the state of the managed networks.

The Drago client, which runs on every host in the network, is responsible for directly interacting with the server through the API, and for retrieving the most up-to-date configurations. Through a simple reconciliation process, the Drago client then guarantees that the WireGuard configurations on each host match the desired state stored in the database. When running in client mode, Drago also takes care of automatically generating key pairs for WireGuard, and sharing the public key so that hosts can always connect to each other.

The only assumption made by Drago is that each host running the client is also running WireGuard, and that the host in which the configuration server is located is reachable through the network.

Drago does not enforce any specific network topology. Its sole responsibility is to distribute the desired configurations, and guarantee that they are correctly applied to WireGuard on every single registered host. This means that it is up to you to define how your hosts are connected to each other and how your network should look like.

Drago is meant to be simple, and provide a solid foundation for higher-level functionality. Need automatic IP assignment, dynamic firewall rules, or some kind of telemetry? You are free to implement on top of the already existing API.

Build

System requirements:

• Golang 1.14+
• Node 10.17.0+
• yarn 1.12.3+

$ go generate
$ go build

Alternatively, you can build with make, for example:

$ make dev
...

To see help on building with make, run:

$ make help
...

Usage

drago --help
drago agent --config=<config_file>

Development

Server

Build the UI:

go generate

Start the Drago server with air:

ROOT_SECRET="<my-root-secret>" ./air.sh

Note that the env variable ROOT_SECRET contains the secret used by Drago to sign and check tokens.

UI

Once Drago server is up and running, start a dev server for the web UI:

cd ui
REACT_APP_REST_API_URL="localhost:8080/api/" yarn start

Both the backend server and the UI server have hot-reloading capabilities.

Build and run the Drago client:

sudo ./drago --config="./dist/client.yml"

Contributing

• Fork it
• Download your fork (git clone https://github.com/your_username/drago && cd drago)
• Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
• Make changes and stage them (git add .)
• Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add some feature')
• Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
• Create new pull request

License

Drago is released under the Apache 2.0 license. See LICENSE.txt