EC2+OpenVPN+ChromeBooks

• ChromeBook is a great travel companion
• EC2 is a perfect service to launch a VPN endpoint on
• OpenVPN works both with ChromeBook and EC2
• This script makes all 3 work together to provide secure connection from locations you don't trust (coffee shops, hotels, airports... etc)
• Step by Step guide with screenshots can be found here:
  • http://porttwentytwo.blogspot.com/2013/03/openvpn-in-ec2-for-chromebooks-part-2.html

How is it done

• Openvpn generates an .ovpn file which cannot be used by ChromeBooks.
• This script generates a .onc file which chromebooks can understand.
• This script will generate the certs and the openvpn server configuration required.
• The file is sent by mail to the user who can just download it, import it and connect to openvpn server immediately.

Detailed setup

This script is specifically written for amazons EC2 instance using amazons linux distribution

• Step 1: Boot up an EC2 instance using Amazon's linux distribution
  • Use t1.micro if you want the cheapest solution
  • Use one of the latest versions of "Amazon Linux AMI" images, which is what this set of scripts is compatible with.
  • Whatever "security group" you pick, make sure you have 443,1193-1194 opened up for both TCP/UDP
• Step 2: Get the scripts...

curl https://nodeload.github.com/royans/ec2_chromeos_openvpn/zip/master > m.zip; unzip m.zip

• Step 3: Update vars.sh
  • This step is optional.
• Step 4: Run setup.sh <email_address>
  • When you get prompts, just press enter to select the default values
• Step 5: Read the "What to do on chromebooks" below to see how to import the ONC file.

Quick setup

If you don't want to worry about customizing the certificate, just run this on EC2 instance.

curl https://raw.github.com/royans/ec2_chromeos_openvpn/master/quicksetup.sh > quicksetup.sh;
chmod +x quicksetup.sh;
sudo ./quicksetup.sh email_address@blogofy.com

What to do on chromebooks

• Download the onc file sent by the script.
• Import ONC file from this page : chrome://net-internals/#chromeos
• At this point you should be able to see the openvpn listed in your connection settings.

Notes

• This is the bare minimum configuration. There are a lot of things you could improve.

  • Enable PAM based login if you want to do password checks. This would be very helpful if you want to share this ONC file with multiple users.
  • However, if you do have multiple users, you should create a unique client cert for everyone.

• TLS-auth is disabled currently. I couldn't figure out how to enable it yet... I know it works, but its not there yet.

• I picked Amazon's EC2 instance with Amazon's distribution because thats the cheapest and most stable distribution on that platform (my personal opinion)

  • The scripts could be adapted to other platforms as well. Few things to think about
    • package manager may be different.
    • I parse output from a few binaries to do things automatically... u may have to test them to make sure format changes don't break the script.

• Updated info here: https://github.com/royans/ec2_chromeos_openvpn/blob/master/README.md

Contributors

• Special thanks to the Ralf Robert Stebner who contributed the core script which did cert conversions and created ONC template: He can be found at: https://plus.google.com/114451000525400904136/