What is this:

Catalyst VPN is a mesh overlay networking tool based on the open source project Nebula. Found here: (https://github.com/slackhq/nebula)

Some key features:

  1. It's mesh, and thus not centralized
  2. Communication is done in a point to point fashion (no router to funnel traffic through :))
  3. It's secure, tunnels are brought up based on mutually authenticated certificates.
  4. It's light weight, and fast.

What's the goal:

To easily deploy fast and secure overlay networks to function similarly to a VPN.

Also, see Potential Use Cases: below

Potential Use Cases:

  1. MSP - use this to provide a secure and mutually authenticated mechanism for connecting to customer endpoints
  2. Business - use this to provide internal support to remote users, or even internal users via a local and fast encryption mechanism
  3. Cloud - Use this to route externally existing facing services to interally facing services w/o physically exposing ports on the host network
  4. VPN alternative - use Catalyst VPN in place of traditional VPN.

What do I need (Requirements):

Catalyst VPN is made up of three parts:

  1. The Certificate Authority (We handle that part)
  2. A host to act as a lighthouse - it needs to have UDP 4242 publicly accessible (We prefer Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL))
  3. Endpoints that allow you shell or GUI access :)