One clarification that may not be obvious: open-sourcing this isn’t primarily about signaling or auditability. If that were the goal, a standalone protocol spec or a minimal reference repo would have been enough.
Instead, we’re deliberately shipping full client and server implementations because the end goal is for this to become an independent, vendor-neutral project, not something tied to AdGuard.
We want it to be usable by any VPN or proxy stack and, over time, to serve as a common baseline for stealthy transports — similar to the role xray/vless play today.
Happy to answer questions or clarify design choices.
I can't thank Adguard enough for providing so much to the community, they are a BIG part of my privacy-funded lifestyle.
Out of the topic — but if you by any chance work on the mobile apps.
Do you know why the iOS version is still sub-par compared to Android?
You all add more features for rooted Android but what about Jailbroken iOS devices?
I have bought 20+ Adguard licenses and have never regretted buying them. Only if the iOS version could be much better.
We are very cautious with Apple as we suffered from them before [1]. So we're trying to stick to the APIs they provide. I hope the new URL filtering API [2] will improve the situation with the system-wide filtering, but our request for API access is still being reviewed by Apple.
Regarding jailbroken iOS devices, unlike Android the numbers are really marginal so it won't be feasible to support them.
Likewise interested in the authoritative answer, but: if I needed to write a decent chunk of code that had to run as close to wire/CPU limits as possible and run across popular mobile and desktop platforms I would 100% reach for Rust.
Go has a lot of strengths, but embedding performance-critical code as a shared library in a mobile app isn't among them.
Performance reasons aside, TrustTunnel is developed by the team whose main language is C++ (and the client library is actually written in C++) so Rust was a more natural choice for them.
We do, and from what we know a bigger problem in China is detecting traffic patterns. SNI filtering is not that big of a deal, in order to block your domain it needs to first learn which one you’re using. What for the traffic patterns, people in China prefer to selectively route traffic to the tunnel. For instance, the client apps allow you to route *.cn domains (or any other domains) directly. It makes it harder to detect that you’re using a VPN.
You mean in TrustTunnel apps? You can create a routing profile there and select which domains/ips are bypassed, and then select that routing profile in the vpn connection settings.
>GFW has been able to filter SNI to block https traffic for a few years now.
SNI isn't really the threat here, because any commercial VPN is going to be blocked by IP, no need for SNI. The bigger threat is tell-tale patterns of VPN use because of TLS-in-TLS, TLS-in-SSH, or even TLS-in-any-high-entropy-stream (eg. shadowsocks).
One clarification that may not be obvious: open-sourcing this isn’t primarily about signaling or auditability. If that were the goal, a standalone protocol spec or a minimal reference repo would have been enough.
Instead, we’re deliberately shipping full client and server implementations because the end goal is for this to become an independent, vendor-neutral project, not something tied to AdGuard.
We want it to be usable by any VPN or proxy stack and, over time, to serve as a common baseline for stealthy transports — similar to the role xray/vless play today.
Happy to answer questions or clarify design choices.