>No “vulnerabilities” in Tailscale were found or exploited, and that might make it even more uncomfortable for us. [...] But, we're a security tool. Their intrusion is our intrusion, and it's our job to take it seriously.
im a happy customer of tailscale, so i am obviously biased, but i have a lot of respect for this. they could have just stayed quiet and i dont think anyone would have bat an eye.
Expect similar articles (cough, ads, cough) in the next couple of days from every single company whose software was involved in the incident.
This is the kind of ad that may be opportunistic but sort of speaks for itself: they're not going to make excuses. I've been happy with Tailscale for years and this is part of why.
And I have no problem with this. Infact it would be nice to be a point of pride to be there to say how your security is handled.
If they take actions that would have further prevented or limited this attack then it seems like a good form of advertising to me.
i doubt it. it's pretty risky to set higher expectations for yourself when no one was really asking.
they are a company, therefor anything they write is an advertisement of sorts, but that doesn't make it bad by default. cloudflare and netflix (among others) also write blog posts that i find interesting and enjoy reading, despite being ads at their core.
Why not? If done right it’s a good way to talk about implications for those companies and provide some education like tailscale did here.
We also saw Anthropic post about “our agent escaped too” and while I understand the incident caused them to review, they found something and needed to disclose, the whole thing came across much worse and largely they got mocked or accused of trying to piggyback, so obviously there are good and bad ways.
If there are other providers with interesting takes, I think they would be worth hearing.
This all has the -aire of theatre. OH NOES THE POWERFUL AI GOT OUT
Then everyone coming out with humbled determination about working together to responsibly use and contain this powerful technology for the greater good (and profit margin).
I will not believe marketing gimmickry is not a large part of what's going on with every one of these "incidents".
Or the infamous promotion of legislation without representation
All aboard the public relations hype train! choo choo!
Oh no! An advertisement! Whatever shall we do‽
Tailscale is responsible for designing a system whose convenient defaults allowed a stolen credential to have a very large blast radius. A marketing blog is not changing that.
Tailscale as a company reminds me of Valve and other good old tech-oriented people that I can "trust" that they know what they're doing. I'm a happy customer too and I hope they retain the essence of what distinguishes Tailscale.
> I can "trust" that they know what they're doing
I wish I could say the same.
At $work we use Tailscale but only bare minimum and at arms length and only because we have to (people were having NAT issues with standard Wireguard).
None of their code has had a security audit, let alone regular ones. Yes they make a big song and dance about SOC2/ISO27001 but that is NOT the same thing, that's just shiny tick-boxes for compliance departments.
They seem to rely entirely on the random goodwill of others to do random audits of unknown coverage at random intervals, not exactly reassuring.
"Tailsale Lock" is, being polite, a hot mess. So many sharp edges and footguns.
Their introduction of TPM-by-default and then removing it a few weeks later because of a seemingly small number of edge-cases and very odd reasoning was just weird.
Yes they are nice guys to chat to and all that. But for a security tool they need to up their game seriously.
(Tailscale CEO) You have posted here multiple times that "none of the code has had a security audit" and that the SOC2 audit "is not the same thing."
It's true that those two audits aren't the same thing. However, the SOC2 auditor confirms, in the published report, that Tailscale has regular and ongoing security audits including penetration tests and many kinds of code reviews.
The security audit report, which you perhaps imagine to be a long list of vulnerabilities... doesn't look like that. It says we don't have a long list of vulnerabilities. The security bulletins are all here: https://tailscale.com/security-bulletins
That link is a list of incidents while the parent comment is referring to security audits of the code.
The majority of your security bulletins are as the result of third-party reports to you.
Which, by definition, means they are not done by you, which means you don't know when they will be done or how much of your code base they are looking at.
I think you know full well what I mean by a security audit. If you don't, go look at, for example, the ones that Mullvad publish for their software https://mullvad.net/en/blog/tag/audits.
Please do not try to portray SOC2 as being the same thing as a code audit.
And IF you have regular code audits, then please publish suitably redacted reports in public on your website. Just like everyone else does !
(Tailscale CEO) I don't know what to tell you. The problems that are found internally, or via security reviews and pentests we pay for, are ones that we fix before releasing. They don't need bulletins.
Bugs that are found by other people are found, by definition, after release. They are therefore more likely to need a bulletin.
But why should insecure argument handling bugs (as per your recent SSH bulletin) be found after release ?
Those are an ancient class of bugs that should be picked up by any competent security review.
Is your theory that "any competent security review" will find every security hole in a product? Because that sure would be great if it were true. Unfortunately it does not match my experience.
I thought it was funny that you dropped the (Tailscale CEO) tag once you were talking about a specific flaw in your product.
Try to be civil
i think its probably okay to drop it when you are this far deep into a conversation and the affiliation has already been stated multiple times in the existing comment chain.
Every security hole ? No, of course not.
But things like insecure argument handling are low-hanging fruit for security auditors.
Insecure argument handling is not like the more advanced subtle vulnerabilities that we are seeing in some LLM-assisted reports these days. Insecure argument handling is 1990's security.
The fundamental problem remains that Tailscale has too many new "features" being added to it the whole time. New features means a whole bunch new code. Which increases bloat and exponentially increases the attack surface.
It would be really nice if you could stop shoehorning in every new feature you can think of. Remove some of the existing ones that don't really need to be there. And get your codebase back to a more focused state, get back to your roots as a VPN product.
Stop trying to be all things to all men, as the old saying goes.
It appears that you have a major bone to pick with Tailscale and direct replies to your concerns do not seem to matter. They have a good security track record and are extremely widely deployed. I don’t see the evidence for your assertions that it is bloated and insecure.
<s>Read</s> Skimmed the report (and cheers for not gating it behind request-to-obtain) and I'm a bit surprised to not see any mentions of pentests which I'd expect given the large surface you host. What gives?
Because that's in the SOC2.
It does too many things, and the product has got too complex. I saw a year ago they were looking for someone just to help with complexity.
I use it but feel uncomfortable, that it has large attack surface and LLMs will find exploits in it.
Without taillock it makes no sense. Anyone on their coordination servers will be able to connect to your network.
The large attack surface is a good point. I started using it initially and the ease of setting up a vpn was nice, but then I came across few security vulnerability postings which led to concern so I went to Wireguard. I think they should reign in the features and treat it as a secure vpn first and foremost and remove unnecessary features to minimize the attack surface.
If you want a hard-to-use VPN with minimal features and minimal surface area, as you said, Wireguard is right there. Tailscale is convenient Wireguard.
> I use it but feel uncomfortable, that it has large attack surface and LLMs will find exploits in it
Doesn't this apply to any application you use? How would it be different with plain wireguard?
> How would it be different with plain wireguard?
Seriously ?
You do realise that of all the security tools on the planet, plain wireguard most likely has the smallest attack surface of them all, right ?
The problem here is as the other poster said. Tailscale is a security tool and yet the guys at Tailscale seem to be insistent on dumping everything INCLUDING the kitchen sink into it as a "feature".
That sort of attitude is not going to end well. You end up with a large bloated code base, which equals large attack surface.
I am talking especially about the LLM part.
Also a kinder tone in your comments would be more appreciated.
I think if you put more thought and effort into your comments kindness will follow. Equating what the OP said to "isn't this like every application ever?" misses the point entirely.
This article is just an ad / public-service-announcement for various paid Tailscale features, though?
And you're under the impression that the purpose of a company blog is WHAT, exactly?
I have recently noticed that the words "ad" or "marketing" have become, in and of themselves, with no additional information or context, slurs or dismissals.
I understand why. The modern internet has turned advertising into a morass of constant bombardment and the only sane response is to block as much as possible and ignore as much else as possible.
But it's unfortunate because, in some sense, ever single thing that a company every says that is not legally mandated in some way is a form of advertising.
And in many cases, that "advertising" contains true, useful information that can be helpful.
What is important isn't whether or not something is an "ad", but instead, whether or not it contains true information that is helpful in some way.
Many ads don't reach this bar. They are either misleading, straight up lying, or information that is almost completely useless.
But when I'm searching for a particular product, about the only source of information at all is some form of advertising, and I almost always find at least some amount of it to be helpful in making a product decision.
Ads are more often than not polluting to the informational ecosystem, but that's not because they are ads.
It's because they are spam. However, this company blog post is an ad that is not spam.
The person I'm replying to says they deserve "a lot of respect for this"
i said i have a lot of respect for this. whether you do or not is up to you.
anything a company writes is an advertisement by the nature of being written by a company. i dont think that means anything a company writes is bad by default. there are many corporate blogs i enjoy reading, or learn from, etc., despite the fact that they are all technically advertisements.
in this case, tailscale is setting a higher expectation for themselves when no one asked for it. i find that respectable.
> tailscale is setting a higher expectation for themselves
What exactly is the higher expectation? As someone with little expertise and no stake in any of this, the blog reads as "our products are great and could have solved this problem if they were being used correctly, so it's not our fault" with a few vague proclamations about how they will improve their UX. This isn't at all a bad thing, it just isn't very notable in my opinion.
>What exactly is the higher expectation?
better defaults, better documentation, better UX, and "But, we didn't stop it. Next time, we will." are all commitments that they didn't need to make, but now they need to follow through with or lose face.
>it just isn't very notable in my opinion.
i agree that this seems to be getting way more attention than i would have expected.
Glad to see companies owning responsibility and putting out a message without corporate PR spin
If you can't see the spin on corporate messaging it means it's working (and consequently, to stretch the metaphor, your wicket is in danger).