> We are committed to keeping your data safe through end-to-end encryption and to making Coder easy to run across a wide variety of systems from client laptops and desktops to VMs, containers, and bare metal. If we used the TCP implementation in the OS, we’d need a way for the TCP packets to get from the operating system back into Coder for encryption. This is called a TUN device in unix-style operating systems and creating one requires elevated permissions, limiting who can run Coder and where. Asking for elevated permissions inside secure clusters at regulated financial enterprises or top secret government networks is at best a big delay and at worst a nonstarter.

The specific part that’s unclear is why encryption needs to be applied at the TCP layer and at that point if they need it at the transport layer why they’re not using something like QUIC which has a much more mature user-space implementation.