Solo Technology

Just how secure is Hamachi, really?

As you may recall, I’ve mentioned Hamachi quite a bit over the last year or two. It’s a slick little service that allows one to easily and quickly establish point to point VPN tunnels between machines. For example, I use it a lot to interconnect the various computers I use. As long as my laptop has an Internet connection, it can have a secure connection to my desktop(s).

Recently, we needed to setup a training server for a client. They just tossed the Hamachi client on the server and let me know the password to join it’s Hamachi network. That was way easier (and quicker) than jumping around doing yet another lan-to-lan VPN tunnel (like this).

Now I’m pondering the idea of rolling it out to more of our servers at work — especially the production ones. The promise of easy, fast and secure access from just about anywhere is very enticing. But I’m also hesitant… I love it, I trust it, but as soon as I start talking about my live production servers, a whole ‘nother level of paranoia comes in to play!

The hamachi security page helps assuage my fears.
Security architecture seems well thought out (keeping in mind I’m a casual crypto guy, not a nuts & bolts expert).
The security white paper (PDF alert) lays it out nicely as well.

Steve Gibson seems to like it. However, his last mention of it from the latter link concludes with, “And, you know, I’m sure Alex has told me the truth, but I have no proof of it. So listeners should certainly be aware of that.”

See, there’s the rub — it isn’t open source so code reviews are unlikely or unexistant.

I’d like to find a link from a “creditable” 3rd party blessing it.

And hey, anyone else using Hamachi? If so, how are you using and how do you like it?

2 Responses to “Hamachi in "Production"”

1. nomatter on June 26th, 2007 7:20 pm
   

   you may want to look at the talk page of hamachi’s wikipedia article. there is an interesting discussion between an original author of hamachi and an open source freak. rather enlightening.

2. Chris on June 26th, 2007 8:00 pm
   

   Thanks “nomatter” If anyone’s curious, the link is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Hamachi

   Some good discussion there and it gave some things to ponder. Just have to filter out the weinie-waving to get to it.

Leave a Reply