What Is Wireguard? 2024 Beginner's Guide to the Protocol

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Key Takeaways: What Is WireGuard?

WireGuard is a modern, open-source VPN protocol that prioritizes performance, simplicity and security through a minimalist design and advanced encryption methods. It operates at the kernel level on Linux, Windows and Android, enabling efficient integration with the operating system and faster speeds than other protocols. Though highly secure, WireGuard lacks certain privacy features like obfuscation and dynamic IP address distribution by default, prompting VPN providers to implement custom solutions to address these shortcomings.

Facts & Expert Analysis:

The WireGuard Protocol Routing: WireGuard utilizes cryptokey routing, associating each peer with a unique private/public key pair instead of traditional IP addresses for routing.

Encryption cipher: It employs the ChaCha20 cipher for encryption, Curve 25519 for key assignment and Poly1305 for authentication.

Fast and secure: WireGuard operates over the UDP transport layer, leveraging its speed while implementing a separate packet confirmation mechanism to ensure reliability.

WireGuard is an innovative VPN protocol that boasts strong performance and security paired with greater simplicity than other popular protocols. Like all other VPN protocols, WireGuard creates an encrypted tunnel for transferring data over the internet, ensuring user privacy and protecting sensitive data from prying eyes. Initially designed as an alternative to OpenVPN, the WireGuard protocol represents new VPN technology, and it was designed with performance, simplicity and ease of implementation in mind. Since its launch in 2015, WireGuard has become one of the dominant VPN protocols, offered by most top-tier VPNs.

The Best WireGuard VPN Providers Are:

NordVPN — The best WireGuard VPN service.
Surfshark — WireGuard VPN with unlimited simultaneous connections.
Proton VPN — Free VPN with WireGuard support.
CyberGhost — Highly customizable WireGuard VPN.
Private Internet Access — Affordable VPN with WireGuard capabilities.

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What Is the WireGuard VPN Protocol?

WireGuard is a modern VPN protocol designed with a focus on minimalism. It’s an open-source protocol based on a very slim codebase and modern encryption protocols, and it integrates directly into the Windows, Android and Linux kernels. It is so impressively lightweight that Linus Torvalds — the creator of Linux — called it a “work of art.” Because it uses fewer lines of code, it has a smaller attack surface, making it less susceptible to cyberattacks. This also leads to reduced overhead and improved performance, and its kernel integration means it works better with the operating system’s network functionality than other VPN protocols.

WireGuard Pros & Cons

WireGuard is among the best VPN protocols to use, but it isn’t without flaws. Bear in mind that even though we list certain disadvantages below, they only apply to the default WireGuard implementation. All VPN providers have to use a custom WireGuard implementation, and each VPN addresses WireGuard’s weaknesses in its own way (we’ll go into more detail on that later).

WireGuard Advantages:

Modern: WireGuard is the latest popular VPN protocol to come out.
Secure: It employs unique security measures, especially for establishing a VPN connection.
Minimal codebase: It uses fewer lines of code than most others, making it less susceptible to attacks. It also uses less processing power and performs better.
Very fast: It is theoretically among the fastest VPN protocols, as it runs at the kernel level.
Easy to implement: All it takes to configure WireGuard client-side is installing an app. The server configuration is much simpler than for other protocols.
Open source: All of WireGuard’s source code is available online for anyone to inspect and improve.

WireGuard Disadvantages:

Lack of obfuscation: WireGuard does not use obfuscation by default (though it does support it).
Static IP addresses: WireGuard does not assign dynamic IP addresses by default, so VPN providers need to implement a custom solution for it.
Not all VPNs support it yet: Because of the IP address issue, many VPN providers haven’t yet put in the effort to include WireGuard in their services.

How Does the WireGuard Tunnel Work & What Is It Used for?

WireGuard was created as a way to replace older protocols using legacy encryption methods such as IKEv2 and OpenVPN. According to the WireGuard white paper, its creators intentionally avoided academic perfection, instead creating a lightweight yet imperfect protocol that solves the issues stemming from that imperfection with practical engineering.

How the WireGuard Protocol Works

At its core, WireGuard operates using the following mechanisms:

Cryptokey Routing
Kernel-Level Implementation
UDP Transport
Secure Key Exchange

WireGuard Protocols & Primitives

WireGuard uses the following protocols and primitives:

ChaCha20: A symmetric encryption algorithm used to encrypt transmitted data.
Poly1305: A message authentication code (MAC) algorithm that is used to authenticate the encrypted data (combined into a single process with ChaCha20 using an AEAD construction).
Curve25519: A specific curve used to establish a shared secret key between the user and the VPN server that is used to encrypt all data in the tunnel.
BLAKE2s: A cryptographic hash function that generates hash values used for secure data authentication.
SipHash24: A cryptographic hash function that generates hash values used in hash tables, ensuring efficient storage and retrieval of data.
HKDF: A key derivation function that generates multiple keys from a single master key.

Does WireGuard Use TCP or UDP? What’s the Difference?

WireGuard is built on the user datagram protocol (or UDP) transport layer, as opposed to the slower, yet more reliable transmission control protocol (TCP). This means that WireGuard doesn’t rely on handshakes to verify and establish a connection between the user and the server. Despite this, the WireGuard protocol does still use a handshake, albeit a simple one, to exchange the symmetric keys that enable communication. This handshake is repeated at intervals in order to provide perfect forward secrecy.

WireGuard Use Cases

Although WireGuard-encrypted tunnels are primarily used for creating VPN connections, it is suitable for a wide range of applications, such as secure communication between devices in the internet of things (IoT), cloud communication or as part of other network security applications.

Which Devices Are Compatible With WireGuard?

WireGuard is compatible with all major operating systems, though it operates slightly differently on each one due to differences in kernel implementation.

WireGuard Compatibility List

Linux: WireGuard is integrated into the Linux kernel.
Windows: WireGuard is integrated into the Windows kernel.
macOS: WireGuard used to be implemented as a kernel extension, offering the same level of performance, though it now operates in user space as a network extension.
Android: Since Android already uses a Linux kernel, it also integrates WireGuard at the kernel level.
iOS: WireGuard only operates in user space.

What this means for you as a user is that, despite WireGuard’s high speeds on Windows, Android and Linux, it might perform as well (or only slightly better) as the user space-based OpenVPN on macOS and iOS platforms.