I love Teleport, but I have some questions about security.

[soomd]

Before I discovered Teleport I tried for a couple of months ShareMouse software. It's pretty awesome but it's not free at all and not support natively SSL/AES encryption.

I tried also Synergy but both are closed-source and prices are too high for my wallet.

I was able to get Teleport to work properly on both my Macbook Pro 2012 High Sierra and my iMac 2017 Catalina and created a certificate for both. It works like a charm.

I'm not a forensic expert and I don't know much about computer security, my fear lies in the validity of the software from a security point of view.

My question is: is a self-created certificate not validated by a third party secure enough to encrypt the incoming and outgoing contents between my Macbook and my iMac?

I just don't want a keylogger in my computer.

Also, I noticed that the technical support is very "off" and the latest updates are 5 years old.

[nbolton]

Hi, a self-signed certificate is secure enough, only if you can ensure that you actually generated the certificate (a bit tricky for less tech-savvy users). Having it signed against a root certificate makes a bit harder to fool the end-user if they're not sure what they're looking for.

Incidentally, all of the keyboard sharing apps you mention (and remote control apps) are a kind of "keylogger" but they're not (intentionally) malicious keyloggers (in that they don't record your keystrokes to be replayed later for "evil" purposes).

Also, I noticed that the technical support is very "off" and the latest updates are 5 years old.

How do you mean "off"? 😃

[soomd]

Hi, thank you for your answer. You've been very kind and assuming you're the creator or co-creator of Teleport, I want to thank you because it's a brilliant software - I'm going to donate to this fantastic project, can you tell me how to do it?

Anyway, can you tell me where I can find a "tutorial" to ensure my certificate? I know it's probably very complicated but I'd like to try.

About what I said about technical support, I thought it was a bit dead but I was wrong.

It's true everything you say about other software, basically I know that none of them have malicious intentions. But it's always better to have FOSS software than closed source.

[nbolton]

Hi, actually I'm just a fan, but Teleport was written by Julien Robert (@abyssoft / jul@abyssoft.com) so I'd recommend emailing him about donations.

[johndbritton]

@soomd Sounds like your security questions were answered as much as they can be in relation to this project. I'm picking up maintenance on Teleport. We don't have much need for donations right now so the best way you can support the project is by continuing to use it and reporting any issues you face. I'd also recommend you click the watch button on GitHub and select "Releases only" to be notified when new releases are made or "Watching" if you want to want to be notified about everything.