this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2026
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Are you sure the VPN server has the smaller attack surface than the SSH server?
Wireguard and apps based on it (like Tailscale) don't respond at all unless the data is signed with the key of a configured peer (or with Tailscale, a system on your tailnet that passes the ACL). It's literally impossible for an outsider/attacker to detect with a port scan since it just ignores unauthenticated packets.
The Wireguard codebase is also extremely small. The core Wireguard implementation (the version in the Linux kernel) is around 5,000 lines long, so an experienced developer can read through all the code if they dedicate a day or two to it, and understand how it works.
For comparison, OpenVPN is around 70,000 lines of code and OpenSSH is around 150,000 lines of code. There's a huge number of features in SSH!
That is a convincing argument. I wasn't thinking of wireguard, but it makes sense that it's quite small and focused, being in the kernel.
I'm dealing more with OpenVPN and that can be very annoying, that had me lean in the opposite direction earlier (and lets not even speak of the Cisco crap).
Why aren't there more minimal implementations like tinyssh?
There's Dropbear SSH, which is the most common choice for a minimal SSH server and client, but even that is around 50,000 lines of code.
Because all those extra features are really useful. You can run all sorts of things over ssh, from sophisticated file transfer to remote development and tunneling
Ssh is remote code execution. Under any implementation, any authentication methods should be the absolute last line of defense after you've properly locked down access
Well, yeah but more features in remote code excution = more vulnerabilities. For example sftp: you could also just run ftp over vpn for the same effect. Or just cat the file over ssh. Instead, we have one big monolith. (same as with everything going over tcp)
OpenVPN, no. Wireguard, yes.