Just a quick notice for anyone using this software in their homelab. Tailscale has released v1.104.4 to address a series of prominent vulnerabilities disclosed last week. These vulns affect the Tailscale Serve and Tailscale SSH functionalities of the software, and allow already-authorized attackers to gain further privileges erroneously. Kindly update to that version or higher, especially if you are using one of the SSH/Serve features.
For headscale selfhosters that also use Tailscale SSH, consider setting TS_SSH_DISABLE_FORWARDING=1 on all clients, as headscale does not have a way to force turning off SSH forwarding (one of the attack vectors). Headscale also has a relevant disclosed vulnerability affecting node registration, and an in-progress patch for that which is trackable here.
Finally, do give your SSH grants/access control list a review again. You may also disable these ssh/serve features if you don’t need them (and even compile the binary without them if you know how), and consider traditional alternatives such as OpenSSH + normal reverse proxy.
Further links:
- Tailscale’s blogpost on findings and fixes, with security recommendations
- Tailscale’s security bulletin for more info on the vulnerabilities (see TS-2026-014 to TS-2026-017)
- Their prior investigation notes here
Doesn’t Tailscale do a lot more, like ACLs and tailnet lock and a web ui and everything? I thought Headscale was trying to provide the same, though I admit I’ve never tried it myself
It does, there’s a lot of features and UI added on top of it because it’s primarily an enterprise-oriented service and large companies tend to have a lot more complex usage scenarios than self-hosters.
Headscale is a FOSS reimplementation from scratch of some of the Tailscale proprietary features. It’s inteded as a fallback option for Tailscale users in case the Tailscale service ever enshittifies, and also as a canary for ongoing verification of the Tailscale claim that the client plane functionality is entirely FOSS and above-board.
Speaking of which, Tailscale today is a great example of a company using FOSS well. They are able to provide commercial services and have proprietary code while at the same time opening the client-facing code so users can see for themselves their privacy is cryptographically proven. They also cooperate very well with Headscale and provide a generous gratis service tier.
My issue with Headscale is that it seems like they are providing a very complex product and haven’t had any security audits (at least last I checked)…
Wireguard is nice because it is very simple, and thus has a much smaller attack surface.