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openhost

What is openhost?

openhost is a protocol and a set of clients that let you reach a service running on your own computer — from a phone, a laptop, or a tablet, anywhere you happen to be — without forwarding a port, renting a tunnel, or handing your traffic to a third party.

What it is

Section titled “What it is”

Three pieces, all mature technology that exists for other reasons:

  • WebRTC data channels. Browsers already know how to hole-punch through NAT and set up end-to-end encrypted links. openhost uses that transport for HTTP.
  • Pkarr over the BitTorrent Mainline DHT. A 15-year-old peer-to-peer DHT with millions of nodes, used to publish signed DNS records keyed by Ed25519 public keys. There is no DNS server the openhost project runs.
  • Your Ed25519 keypair as your identity. The public key is the address. The private key never leaves the device it was generated on.

When you pair a client to a host, the client’s public key goes onto a local allowlist on the host. From then on, connections work anywhere either device has an internet path.

What it is not

Section titled “What it is not”
  • Not a VPN. It does not give you a network interface for arbitrary traffic.
  • Not a public hosting service. The host’s pubkey is its address — you wouldn’t put that on a business card.
  • Not anonymous. The pubkey is visible to anyone watching the DHT. What’s private is the data that flows between paired devices.
  • Not a substitute for a real domain when you want public audiences. For that, use Cloudflare Tunnel or a regular web host.

Why a self-hoster would use it

Section titled “Why a self-hoster would use it”

You already own the computer the service runs on. You already own your data. The question is: why are you renting the network path between yourself and your server?

ngrok, Tailscale Funnel, and Cloudflare Tunnel all solve reachability by putting a company in the middle. That’s a reasonable trade — those companies are competent — but it’s still a trade. A company can change its pricing. A company can shut down. A company can, in certain jurisdictions, be compelled to hand over data. openhost removes that middle entirely.

Status

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Pre-alpha. The protocol is being specified; builds are not yet shipping. Watch the repository for the M1 tag.

Next

Section titled “Next”