README

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                  /_/        v0.0.3

Secure and simple terminal sharing

warp lets you securely share your terminal with one simple command: warp open. When connected to your warp, clients can see your terminal exactly as if they were sitting next to you. You can also grant them write access, the equivalent of handing them your keyboard.

warp distinguishes itself from "tmux/screen over ssh" by its focus and ease of use as it does not require an SSH access to your machine or a shared server for others to collaborate with you.

Despite being still quite experimental, warp has already proven itself useful especially in the context of:

• Interaction with remote team-members
• New engineer onboarding (navigating code in group without projection)

Installation

MacOSX (using Homebrew)

# Requires Homebrew installed. See https://brew.sh/

brew install warp

From source code

# Requires Go to be installed on your machine. You can easily install Go from
# https://golang.org/doc/install

go get -u github.com/spolu/warp/client/cmd/warp

In case of difficulties, please refer to Troubleshooting your warp installation.

Usage

Instantly start sharing your terminal (read-only) under warp ID goofy-dev with:

# You can name your warps however you want (here **goofy-dev**). In particular
# a cryptographically secure random ID will be generated for you if you don't
# specifiy a name.

$ warp open goofy-dev

This will create a new warp goofy-dev and will connect you to it locally with write-access. From there, anyone can connect (read-only) to your warp with:

$ warp connect goofy-dev

Creating a new warp spawns a new shell, and closing it is therefore as easy as killing that shell with exit or CTRL-D.

Granting and revoking write-access

From inside a warp, retrieve the list of connected users with:

$ warp state

Grant write-access to a client (be extra careful! see the Security section below):

$ warp authorize stan

Revoke previously granted write-access with:

$ warp revoke stan

Security

warp is a powerful, and therefore, dangerous tool. Its misuse can potentially enable an attacker to easily gain arbitrary remote code execution priviledges.

TLS connections

The connection between your host as well as your warp clients and the warpd server are established over TLS, protecting you from man in the middle attacks.

Read-only by default

By default, warps are created read-only. Being protected by TLS does not protect you from phishing. Be extra careful when running warp authorize.

IDs are secure and secret

Generated warp IDs are cryptographically secure and not publicized. If you want to authorize someone to write to your warp, we recommend you use a generated warp ID (to protect yourself against phishing attacks).

Trustless read-only

In particular, when your warp does not authorize anyone to write, it does not trust the warpd daemon to enforce that noone other than you can write to it. When at least one client is authorized to write, warp does trust the warpd daemon it is connected to to enforce the read/write policy of clients.

Roadmap

• v0.0.2 "bare"
  • bare functionalities (see TODO)
• v0.0.3 "safe"
  • persisted user token/secret
  • graceful host reconnection
• v0.0.4 "vt100"
  • terminal emulation to achieve:
    • full redraw on connection
    • top status bar
    • terminal truncation
    • no resize required anymore
  • web-socket / HTTPS instead of raw sockets
• v0.0.5 "cipher"
  • e2e encryption based on warp ID
• future releases
  • warp voice :warp lets you voice-over a warp
  • warp signin and verified usernames

Notes

warp is not a fork of tmux

warp is not a fork of tmux[0] and is not a terminal emulator (for now). It really simply multiplexes stdin/stdout to raw ptys between host and clients. For that reason, if you connect to a warp already running a GUI-like application (tmux, vim, htop, ...) it might take time or host interactions for the GUI-like application to visually reconstruct properly client-side.

In particular, since warp does not emulate the terminal it cannot reformat or truncate the output of the host terminal to fit client terminal windows which may lead to distorted outputs client side if the terminal sizes mismatch. To mitigate that, warp relies on automatic client terminal resizing (pending v0.0.4, see Roadmap).

Automatic client terminal resize

Once connected as a client and whenever the host terminal window size changes, warp will attempt to resize your terminal window to the hosting tty size. For that reason it is recommended to run warp connect from a new terminal window[1].

Development of warp

Development of warp is generally broadcasted in warp-dev. Feel free to connect at any time.

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[0] You can run a warp from within tmux (or screen) or tmux from within a warp. It's also fine to run a warp from within a warp.

[1] Terminals supporting window resizes based on the \033[8;h;wt ANSI escape sequence: