Rover Field Network Systems

Rover software

Software

Hardware decides where packets land. Software decides who is allowed to send them. Every Rover node runs the same policy plane and reports to the same control plane, whether it is a router on a wall, a switch in a closet, or a gateway in a rolling case on the back of a truck.

Five layers

Overlay

One network across carriers you do not control

Nodes join an encrypted overlay that spans sites, carriers, and clouds, over WireGuard or ZeroTier. A branch office, a teleworker, and a field kit share one addressable network even when the path underneath each of them is a different provider on a different continent.

Identity

Verify, then segment

Users and devices authenticate against your directory, RADIUS, or an API before the network answers. After access, VLAN and DNN segmentation keep a compromised endpoint inside its own blast radius instead of the whole site.

Measurement

Every node is a measurement point

Client health, RF conditions, path quality, and uplink state stream back continuously. Scheduled and on-demand throughput tests run from the node against targets you choose, which measures the circuit as delivered rather than as a laptop on a crowded channel sees it.

Filtering

eBPF policy that survives the WAN

Filtering runs in the kernel through eBPF, classifying and dropping on the data path rather than hauling packets through a userspace proxy. DNS and content policy apply per SSID and per group, and enforcement stays local when the uplink drops, so a site that loses its circuit does not also lose its controls.

Orchestration

Zero Touch Provisioning

Nodes pull their configuration on first boot from private or hybrid cloud. Keys, policy, and segmentation arrive with it, so the person unboxing the kit does not need to be the person who understands the network.

Protocol

Why WireGuard carries the overlay

The case for WireGuard is not speed. It is how little of it there is to get wrong.

What it is

Codebase
Roughly 4,000 lines, against hundreds of thousands in OpenVPN and IPsec stacks
Cryptography
Noise protocol framework, fixed cipher suite
Negotiation
None. There is no suite to downgrade an endpoint into
Handshake
1-RTT, with forward secrecy
Kernel
Merged into mainline Linux in 5.6, March 2020
Author
Jason A. Donenfeld
Platforms
Linux · macOS · Windows · Android · iOS

Also supported

ZeroTier
Peer-to-peer overlay, for estates already running it or where direct reachability beats a fixed hub
IPsec
Where a peer, a policy, or an existing estate requires it
L2TP
Legacy interoperability
OpenVPN
Legacy interoperability
Stealth
Where the transport itself has to be unremarkable to a middlebox
What WireGuard does not do. It is a transport. It assumes you already know which public key belongs to which peer, and it has no opinion about how that key arrived. Distribution, rotation, and revocation are the hard parts, and they belong to the orchestration layer above it. A protocol choice is not a security architecture.

Control plane

Deployment

Hosting
Private or hybrid cloud, customer-controlled
Provisioning
Zero Touch Provisioning on first boot
AAA
Directory · RADIUS · API
Multi-tenant
VRF separation per tenant or per program

Telemetry

Interface
O-RAN O1 with VES event streaming
Scope
Routers, switches, and gateways report to one plane
Tests
Scheduled and on-demand throughput and latency
Operations
24 × 7 × 365 NOC, SOC 2 portal