Only supports the UDP transmission protocol.

Your feedback is welcome, as always.This fairly new VPN protocol offers a great blend of speed and security. I hope you have a slightly better understanding of WireGuard. Some of the popular privacy focused VPNs like Mullvad VPN are already using WireGuard and the adoption is likely to grow in the near future. WireGuard is gaining popularity for the good reasons. The inclusion of WireGuard in Kernel 5.6 will most likely extend the adoption of WireGuard and thus change the current VPN scene. It will be included in the kernel by default.

Starting kernel 5.6, you won’t need manually add the kernel module. When you install WireGuard as a kernel module, you are basically modifying the Linux kernel on your own and add some code to it. Regular applications like VLC, GIMP etc are installed on top of the Linux kernel (in user space), not inside it. Let me explain it to you.Īt present, you can install WireGuard on Linux as a kernel module. You know that you can install and configure a WireGuard VPN server on Linux but then you also read the news that Linux Kernel 5.6 is going to include WireGuard. This could be confusing to new Linux users. Linus Torvalds If WireGuard is already available, then what’s the fuss about including it in Linux kernel? Linux creator Linus Torvalds loves WireGuard so much that he is merging it in the Linux Kernel 5.6:Ĭan I just once again state my love for it and hope it gets merged soon? Maybe the code isn’t perfect, but I’ve skimmed it, and compared to the horrors that are OpenVPN and IPSec, it’s a work of art. These are some of the reasons why WireGuard has become increasingly popular. Since WireGuard runs in the kernel space, it provides secure networking at a high speed. WireGuard supports all the state-of-the-art cryptography like like the Noise protocol framework, Curve25519, ChaCha20, Poly1305, BLAKE2, SipHash24, HKDF, and secure trusted constructions. It is clearly easier to debug WireGuard.ĭon’t go by its simplicity. Compare it to 100,000 lines of code of OpenVPN (another popular open source VPN). There are way too many things to do here.Īnother good thing about WireGuard is that it has a lean codebase with just 4000 lines of code. Now compare it to the OpenVPN set up guide. You install WireGuard, generate public and private keys (like SSH), set up firewall rules and start the service.

Openvpn vs wireguard