[GSoC 2023] VPN Support Project | Haiku Project

About Me

Hello everyone! My name is Sean Brady, and I am currently in my Sophomore year at Oregon State University studying Computer Science. In early January of this year, I decided to become a contributor for a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project focused on operating systems where I researched Haiku and its projects which interested me and the VPN Support Project in particular. From what I can tell, interest in bringing a VPN to Haiku has been in the works since the BeOS days and more recently the tun.cpp file about 4 years ago.

For reference, I also go by Swangeon on Github.

Current Goals

Here are the plans I have to achieve certain goals that I have for the project. As this is just the start of everything, they are subject to change as I go forward with the project.

TUN Virtual Driver

The first part of the project that I have planned is the development of the TUN virtual driver which is used by VPNs to connect to remote servers. I want to use the tun.cpp file as a base for the TUN/TAP virtual interface that will also take inspiration from the loopback.cpp file since a loopback device is also a virtual device interface. However, the driver module does not have any way to receive data so that will have to be implemented through the net_buffer library.

Unit testing on this front will be a combination of ifconfig, route, and ping with a virtual network I have set up to test if the driver is functioning properly.

VPN Implementation

Once done with the TUN virtual driver, I will then be moving onto the OpenVPN port which will be implemented through a recipe for any required packages and any changes needed to the source code to be able to find and use the TUN virtual driver.

I will most likely be porting over OpenVPN as that runs in userspace and for the most part I only have to deal with the interaction between the application and TUN virtual driver.

Conclusion

Thank you to Google for hosting GSoC and my mentors, Scottmc and Korli. As I go about the project I will be trying to post my progress on everything at least once a month but I do want to try posting updates bi-weekly. Looking forward to working with my mentors and the community!