hyper-nat

tl;dr: play lan games with your friends or use any other network oriented tool over the internet using peer to peer magic

This program can securely negotiate and tunnel sets of UDP and TCP connections between servers and clients, allowing them to carry out low latency two directional communications without any external routing using back-punching or hole-punching mechanisms with heuristic optimizations to cater for 99% of modern internet connections.

Features

• Simple command-line interface
• Support for TCP, UDP, and TCP-over-UDP protocols
• Flexible port mapping (map local ports to different remote ports)
• Multiple connection support with different protocols
• Configuration file support for persistent setups

It does this by establishing a peer to peer connection directly to the other computer using an amazing technology called hyperswarm.

https://github.com/hyperswarm

Run server ports on one computer, and run client ports on a group of clients, and you can connect a group of computers to your server.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFyCTpgiTUE

If you do not wish to download node.js, you can get a prebuild version for windows under releaases.

You will be receive a public public key to share with your friends, that goes into their options.json, make sure to configure your servers options.json to have a unique secretkey sot hat the publickey can be unique

WINDOWS TROUBLESHOOTING

the terminal in windows pauses when you click on it, it goes into a text-selection mode, just click on the window and press enter if any area is selected to unstick it.

Configure a options.json file

server config for a udp and a tcp port

mode

selects client or server

proto

selects tcp or udp

port

specifies the port number to share

host

specifies where the game/app server is running

secret

is your unique secret code, dont use the same one in two places, because its also your identifier on the peer to peer network

{
    "schema": [
        {
            "mode": "server",
            "proto": "udp",
            "port": "7913",
            "host": "127.0.0.1",
            "secret":"thisisaseretsecret"
        },
        {
            "mode": "server",
            "proto": "tcp",
            "port": "7915",
            "host": "127.0.0.1",
            "secret":"thisisaseretsecret"
        }
    ]
}

CLI Usage

Server Mode

# Run server on single port
hyper-nat server -p 3000 -s mysecret

# Run server with TCP-over-UDP on port 3000
hyper-nat server -p 3000 --protocol tcpudp -s mysecret

# Run server on multiple ports with different protocols
hyper-nat server -p 3000,3001,3002 --protocol udp,tcp,tcpudp -s mysecret

Client Mode

# Connect local port 8080 to remote port 80
hyper-nat client -l 8080 -r 80 -k <publickey>

# Connect using TCP-over-UDP from local 8080 to remote 80
hyper-nat client -l 8080 -r 80 --protocol tcpudp -k <publickey>

# Connect multiple ports with different protocols
hyper-nat client -l 8080,8081 -r 80,443 --protocol udp,tcpudp -k <publickey>

Configuration File

You can also use a configuration file (options.json) instead of command line arguments.

Client Config Example

{
  "schema": [
    {
        "mode": "client",
        "proto": "udp",
        "localPort": "8080",
        "port": "80",
        "publicKey": "8KdZA6WUUjkpSJSFoUHKfuj2hTygNkbLFnREPwn8u89r"
    },
    {
        "mode": "client",
        "proto": "tcp",
        "localPort": "8081",
        "port": "443",
        "publicKey": "8KdZA6WUUjkpSJSFoUHKfuj2hTygNkbLFnREPwn8u89r"
    }
  ]
}

Note: The publicKey is provided by the person who starts the server. It will be printed on their terminal when their app starts and is based on their secret.

building

To build the exe yourself, use a nexe compatible version of node, then run nexe in the path, remember to copy the static builds for sodium and udx

A big thank you to Mathias Buus aka mafintosh for all the help and guidance with my n00b questions and for adding the neccesary features as this project was developed