How much Tailscale is this still if the transport is based on wireguard, the control plane is something new with the keys based on the wireguard keys? Genuinely confused.
I dug into it a bit because I had the same question. The network layer here is wrapping around the Tailscale daemon's magicsock, which is the thing that does all the DERPing and NAT hole punching. Tailcat builds sort of a fake control plane that does a one way key exchange over DERP (the Meow message type) between client and server, then both sides do the normal CallMeMaybe dance to connect.
I dug into it a bit because I had the same question. The network layer here is wrapping around the Tailscale daemon's magicsock, which is the thing that does all the DERPing and NAT hole punching. Tailcat builds sort of a fake control plane that does a one way key exchange over DERP (the Meow message type) between client and server, then both sides do the normal CallMeMaybe dance to connect.