landline

Play LAN games online without VPNs or port forwarding, over WebRTC.

Existing solutions for playing LAN multiplayer games over the internet typically involve either port forwarding in your router, or connecting two machines via a VPN. Both of these methods have some security implications:

1. Using a VPN can give your game partner access to much more than just the game you want to play, potentially access to your entire network

2. Port Forwarding can allow anyone on the internet to send packets to your game, which is especially concerning for games which may have unpatched security vulnerabilities.

Landline attempts to solve these problems by communicating over a private connection without exposing ports to the entire internet, and ensuring that your partner is only able to send and receive traffic from the specific game you are playing.

Landline also makes joining the session as easy as sharing a 6-digit code (and an optional password) with anyone who wants to play.

    sequenceDiagram
    box Alice's PC
    participant Alice's Game
    participant Alice's Landline
    end
    box Bob's PC
    participant Bob's Landline
    participant Bob's Game
    end
    Alice's Game->>Alice's Landline: packet gets sent<br>over LAN
    Alice's Landline->>Bob's Landline: packet is forwarded<br>over WebRTC
    Bob's Landline->>Bob's Game: Packet delivered<br>over LAN

Loading

Configuration

In order to maintain control over where game traffic can be received from, connections are configured on a per-game basis using the lightweight embedded scripting system rhai.rs.