The spiped secure pipe daemon
Spiped (pronounced "ess-pipe-dee") is a utility for creating symmetrically encrypted and authenticated pipes between socket addresses, so that one may connect to one address (e.g., a UNIX socket on localhost) and transparently have a connection established to another address (e.g., a UNIX socket on a different system). This is similar to 'ssh -L' functionality, but does not use SSH and requires a pre-shared symmetric key.
Spiped uses strong and well-understood cryptographic components: The initial key negotiation is performed using HMAC-SHA256 and an authenticated Diffie-Hellman key exchange over the standard 2048-bit "group 14"; following the completion of key negotiation, packets are transmitted encrypted with AES-256 in CTR mode and authenticated using HMAC-SHA256. The simplicity of the code — about 4000 lines of C code in total, of which under 1000 are specific to spiped (the rest is library code originating from kivaloo and Tarsnap) — makes it unlikely that spiped has any security vulnerabilities.
On the author's 2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 laptop, spiped operates at approximately 200 Mbps.
Download
The following versions of spiped are available:
| Version | Release date | SHA256 hash |
| spiped 1.1.0 | 2011-09-10 | b727b902310d217d56c07d503c4175c65387ff07c9cd50a24584903faf9f3dc3 |
| spiped 1.0.0 | 2011-07-04 | 82df05533bf8d8580f57e6dbec7d7e2966eabd3ea7a0a0bb06f87000947969a3 |
Mailing list
The spiped secure pipe daemon is discussed on the spiped@tarsnap.com mailing list.