Tailscale Authentication For Minecraft

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Computers can be used for a variety of things. Some of them are more productive than others. My blog post shows how to authenticate to Grafana. Some people saw the idea of using Tailscale for authenticating to any service as a fascinating fact. Others saw this as an opportunity to study new uses for Tailscale authentication. MINECRAFT Here's the story of such instance. This is how you can enable your Minecraft server join your tailnet and connect to it with Tailscale.



One of the most important questions you could be asking is "Why on earth would you do this?" I would like to respond with a different question: "Why not?" A great man has said, "Science isn't about 'why why?' but rather 'why not?'" We take this concept seriously at Tailscale.



Incorporating your Minecraft server into your tailnet using Tailscale for authentication offers these benefits:



You can limit access to your Minecraft server to your tailnet, so only those who you know have access to it. If you don't want everyone except for the known griefer be connected to your server, you can make use of ACLs. - You can attribute Minecraft users to Tailscale users, which allows you to keep a better log of who is using the server. - You do not have to alter your Minecraft server using Forge, Bukkit, Paper or Spigot mods, this allows you to run an all-natural setup with very little extra configuration. You can use Node Sharing to add your friends, fellow citizens in blood, and even squadmates to your Minecraft server without having to reveal your server to the internet's scary whimsies. You could also share it with your hopefully less terrifying friends already on your tailnet. The Minecraft server will be visible on your tailnet like any other machine.



This also comes with an array of disadvantages, too:



- This will not work with the Bedrock version of Minecraft (the one that runs on phones, consoles tablets and phones). If you are unsure what version of Minecraft you are using, click here to find out how to discern the difference between the two. - You have to disable the Minecraft server's authentication stack. - If your server listens to the internet publically, this will allow anyone to join the server without verifying who they are. This is exactly what we want.



You might be able to circumvent this using server side mods, but they are out of the scope of this article since we're focused on using unmodified Minecraft clients and servers.



Use a different email address to work around this issue in the event of.



This is accomplished by creating an authentication proxy, much like we did before with Grafana. The proxy will monitor traffic on your tailnet , and then forward it to the Minecraft server with one notable exception. At the beginning of the Minecraft session, the client will send the server a packet with the username of the user trying to log in.



Normally the server is supposed to take the contents of that packet and check it against Mojang authentication servers to ensure that you are actually registered as that username in your Minecraft launcher. Based on the results, the server will accept or deny connections. Instead of relying on Mojang for authentication , we could use Tailscale to depend on Tailscale as an authentication. If we also had Mojang for authentication the proxy will look up Tailscale identity information for the Minecraft session and replace the Minecraft username that the client provided you with the information about the user from Tailscale however Mojang's authentication servers will not know what to do about this. We bypass them using offline mode in Minecraft which doesn't require any authentication.



After the authentication dance, the proxy will forward Minecraft traffic just like any other proxy. You can then mine and craft the content you want to share with the people who you trust. You'll be able chat with your colleagues and come up with amazing things together.



Setup



If you're planning to configure this on your tailnet, then you'll need to use the patched version proxy infrared. Infrared is commonly employed by Minecraft servers to host giant Minecraft servers that can scale up to thousands of players simultaneously however, it's also universal enough that we can use it to connect to a basic vanilla Minecraft server.



Set up everything as you would normally with infrared, but be sure to change the environment variable TS_AUTHKEY. This will create a brand new authkey. If you label the key, your Minecraft server's node key will not expire, and it will remain connected to your tailnet which allows you to craft and mine for the rest of your life!



Something to be aware of is that infrared requires you to connect with the full domain name of the Minecraft server. It is extremely selective about this. We will use the MagicDNS domain that every tailnet has for free. Assuming your Minecraft server is on port 25565, copy the following into configs/tailscale.json:



You can find this domain by going to the DNS settings page and searching for the domain ending in .beta.tailscale.net - it should be your account's domain followed by .beta.tailscale.net. Add minecraft-proxy. To get your domain's full name, add minecraft-proxy at the end of this line.



Make sure that you set server-ip to 127.0.0.1 and server-port to 25565 within your server.properties file so that it isn't listening to the public internet:



We can be reached on Twitter @Tailscale if you have any other ideas or creative ways to utilize computers.



The forging of this gorgeous creation was thanks to the efforts of TJ Horner. I hope you found this article informative.

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