Installing and Using Wireguard, obviously with containers

Thursday, June 14, 2018

Wireguard is the hip, new way to VPN :P

No, but seriously I wanted to try it out because it is super interesting and I think the direction it is going is awesome. Read about it on their website if you have not already.

What is cool about Wireguard is it integrates into the Linux networking stack so you have a lot of power over interactions with it. In other words, it is very easy to clone the interface into specific containers. Or just use it on your host.

If you are new to my blog, I HATEEEE installing things on my host. I run everything in containers. Wireguard is a kernel module. BUT guess what, literally anything can be run in a container. This post is going to go over how to install the Wireguard module by using a container and how to run the tools from a container as well.

UPDATE (April 2020): You might want to use Tailscale. It is simple to install and cross platform since it uses the go implementation of wireguard. Then you don’t have to mess with the kernel!

I will never forget this thread from 2017 ;) so glad to see the go implementation happen!

Soooooo waiting for the userspace portable Go implementation. — Filippo Valsorda 🇮🇹 (@FiloSottile) June 21, 2017

Installing

I wrote a Dockerfile for installing the kernel module.

You can run it with:

$ docker run --rm -it \ --name wireguard \ -v /lib/modules:/lib/modules \ -v /usr/src:/usr/src:ro \ r.j3ss.co/wireguard:install

This only works if you have your kernel headers installed in /usr/src and your kernel allows kernel modules ( CONFIG_MODULES=y ). This will change your kernel modules on your host since you are mounting that directory.

If you are like me and set CONFIG_MODULES=n then you can use my kernel-builder Dockerfile to build a custom kernel.

$ docker run --rm -it \ -v /usr/src:/usr/src \ -v /lib/modules:/lib/modules \ -v /boot:/boot \ --name kernel-builder \ r.j3ss.co/kernel-builder

That will pop you into a bash shell where you can run the following build script to build a specific kernel version.

# build_kernel 4.17.1

That saves the vmlinuz to /boot (on your host, since you mounted that directory) where you can then update your initramfs for the new image and add it to your bootloader if needed.

wg is the command for interacting with Wireguard. You can learn more about it in their docs.

I put the tools in a container and added a bash alias for them:

$ type wg wg is a function wg () { docker run -it --rm --log-driver none -v /tmp:/tmp --cap-add NET_ADMIN --net host --name wg r.j3ss.co/wg "[email protected]" }

Then you can run the following commands to try sending some packets through Wireguard. The below steps come from the following script which is Copyright (C) 2015-2018 Jason A. Donenfeld. All Rights Reserved. GPL-2.0 . I merely added comments for the steps.

$ export WG_PRIVATE_KEY="$(wg genkey)" # open file descriptior 3 with some initial details # this is just wireguard's demo server, you can use the container to spin up # your own, don't actually use this as your server $ exec 3<>/dev/tcp/demo.wireguard.com/42912 $ wg pubkey <<<"$WG_PRIVATE_KEY" >&3 $ IFS=: read -r status server_pubkey server_port internal_ip <&3 # make sure the status is "OK" $ echo $status OK # delete the link if you already had one $ sudo ip link del dev wg0 || true # create the wireguard link $ sudo ip link add dev wg0 type wireguard # save the private key to a temporary file # obviously in a real world scenario we wouldn't be throwing these around # all willy nilly $ echo "$WG_PRIVATE_KEY" > /tmp/wg-privatekey # configure the interface $ wg set wg0 private-key /tmp/wg-privatekey peer "$server_pubkey" allowed-ips 0.0.0.0/0 endpoint "demo.wireguard.com:$server_port" persistent-keepalive 25 # assign an ip address/peer $ sudo -E ip address add "$internal_ip"/24 dev wg0 # bring the interface up $ sudo ip link set up dev wg0 # make it the default route $ export WG_HOST="$(wg show wg0 endpoints | sed -n 's/.*\t\(.*\):.*/\1/p')" # add the routes $ sudo -E ip route add $(ip route get $WG_HOST | sed '/ via [0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}/{s/^\(.* via [0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\).*/\1/}' | head -n 1) $ sudo ip route add 0/1 dev wg0 $ sudo ip route add 128/1 dev wg0

Test it is routing!

$ curl https://httpbin.j3ss.co/ip {"origin":"163.172.161.0"}

And that’s all. Just thought it was kinda fun using this and now it is very easy to install :)