Wireguard
Take modern network tunnels to the next level
WireGuard is a next generation VPN protocol that uses state of the art cryptography. One of the most exciting recent crypto-networking developments, WireGuard aims to drastically simplify secure tunneling. The current state of VPN protocols is not pretty, with popular options, such as IPsec and OpenVPN, being overwhelmingly complex, with large attack surfaces, using mostly cryptographic designs from the 90s. WireGuard presents a new abuse-resistant and high-performance alternative based on modern cryptography, with a focus on implementation and usability simplicity. It uses a 1-RTT handshake, based on NoiseIK, to provide perfect forward secrecy, identity hiding, and resistance to key-compromise impersonation attacks, among other important security properties, as well as high performance transport using ChaCha20Poly1305. A novel IP-binding cookie MAC mechanism is used to prevent against several forms of common denial-of-service attacks, both against the client and server, improving greatly on those of DTLS and IKEv2. Key distribution is handled out-of-band with extremely short Curve25519 points, which can be passed around in the likes of OpenSSH. Discarding the academic layering perfection of IPsec, WireGuard introduces the idea of a "cryptokey routing table", alongside an extremely simple and fully defined timer-state mechanism, to allow for easy and minimal configuration; WireGuard is actually securely deployable in practical settings. In order to rival the performance of IPsec, in addition to cross-platform implementations, WireGuard is implemented inside the Linux kernel, but unlike IPsec, it is implemented in less than 4,000 lines of code, making the implementation manageably auditable. These features converge to create an open source VPN utility that is exceedingly simple, yet thoroughly modern and secure.
- The project's own website: https://wireguard.com
Why does this actually matter to end users?
The internet is unfortunately not only populated just by kind and careful people. And it wasn't designed to be secure either. This is a dangerous and rather unfortunate combination of circumstances, and one you should take into account when you use the internet. When you go online outside of your house or office, chances are you use whatever wireless network you can find to get online. Mobile internet subscriptions are still expensive, so it is logical people seize every opportunity to connect for free. While this is a daily habit for many millions of people, and often nothing bad happens, it does expose you to serious risks.
This is because your computer doesn't really know a lot about the world. It depend on information it gets from the networks it connects to. If the network happens to cheat, the computer often has very little defenses. If you use an untrustworthy network to connect you to the internet, you move yourself into the middle of enemy territory. While you happily enjoy your free bits it provides as a way to buy money, it has ample opportunity to exploit all kinds of security weaknesses against you. Essentially, if you got away scot free with connecting to an unsafe network, it probably wasn't your security that held anyone back. You were just lucky that no-one serious tried to do anything - this time. So it is recommended to not connect over wifi networks you don't know.
Unless of course you've arranged for a secure tunnel that allows you to teleport your internet traffic across the unsafe local network to the real internet unscathed. The concept is surprisingly simple: individual messages sent through the Internet, called packets, are encrypted using some mechanism, and this encrypted message then substitutes the original one, making all communications sent through the tunnel unreadable to eavesdroppers and unalterable to attackers. Proven cryptography protects the integrity of the traffic flowing through the tunnel. And once the packets reach the other end of the tunnel, they can be unpacked. From that point onwards they may continue their life as normal internet traffic. Travelling the path in reverse path is of course also possible: packets sent from the internet to your computer are protected in exactly the same way.
In anticipation of better technologies that should arrive with the next generation internet, such tunnels are a key technology to guarantee consumer safety. They play a major role in protecting users both from snooping and malicious traffic injection. Sadly, the tools to create these secure tunnels is rather cumbersome (if not plain hard) to work with. This has prevented mass adoption.
WireGuard is a completely new entrant to the field, and it is praised widely by technologists for its very high quality. Its goal is to be the most secure and easiest to use VPN solution available. Wireguard has many attractive traits: it is fast, simple and lean. It can run on embedded interfaces and super computers alike, and is fit for many different circumstances. Wireguard makes it very easy to set up a secure tunnel with modern technologies. It employs formally verified cryptographic constructions and has best in class performance. So you can more safely browse the web without annoying delay, even from potentially unsafe networks.
WireGuard starts from scratch with modern cryptography and best-practice defense-in-depth implementation strategies. It is suitable and easily deployable for both end users and in data centers across the world, and provides an essential core building block for making the Internet safer. Within the project the team will continue the effort to make WireGuard land within the Linux kernel, upgrade some parts of the cryptography inside the Linux kernel because the current options are flawed, and do a comparative analysis of Wireguard protocol implementations on Windows, iOS and Android so quality and reliability can be assured across implementations.
This project was funded through the NGI0 PET Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825310.
