WireGuard (2024)

FAQs

Is there anything better than WireGuard? ›

There are no known security flaws in either protocol. If security is your topmost priority, the conservative option is OpenVPN. It has simply been around much longer than WireGuard, gone through more third-party security audits, and has a far longer track record than WireGuard.

Is WireGuard secure? WireGuard is considered by many to be one of the safest, most secure VPN protocol options available today. Simplified design using less code equals fewer bugs and security vulnerabilities, while WireGuard's faster state-of-the-art cryptography employs superior default security settings.

The main drawback of the WireGuard protocol is that it was not built for anonymity and privacy. Its privacy is primarily questioned because it requires users to log their data. Instead of assigning a different IP address to the user, it gives the same IP address each time.

One of the key advantages of WireGuard is its minimal attack surface. The protocol's codebase is remarkably small, consisting of only a few thousand lines of code. This lean design reduces the potential for vulnerabilities and makes it easier to audit and maintain the codebase.

Performance. Using WireGuard directly offers better performance than using Tailscale. Tailscale does more than WireGuard, so that will always be true. We aim to minimize that gap, and Tailscale generally offers good bandwidth and excellent latency, particularly compared to non-WireGuard VPNs.

Based on these findings, if you're looking for the fastest secure tunneling protocol, you should go with NordLynx (or WireGuard). The second fastest will be IKEv2, which can confidently hold its own even when connecting to the other side of the world.

WireGuard does not provide obfuscation, meaning that internet service providers (ISPs) can see when you are using it — although, of course, they can't see what you're using it for.

Yes, WireGuard can be detected. It doesn't do VPN obfuscation, mostly because of the insistence on UDP transmission mode.

The good news is that there is almost no way to track live, encrypted VPN traffic. Law enforcement can only obtain data, if available, about websites visited and so on. Otherwise, hackers and snooping government agencies are generally blocked by the fact that the data is encrypted.

Is WireGuard not secure? ›

WireGuard has forward secrecy of data packets, thanks to its handshake, but the handshake itself encrypts the sender's public key using the static public key of the responder, which means that a compromise of the responder's private key and a traffic log of previous handshakes would enable an attacker to figure out who ...

Internally WireGuard stores the time of the latest handshake so that it knows what to do when exchanging data with a peer: When fewer than 120 seconds have elapsed, just send data as the session is still active. 120 to 179 seconds have elapsed, send data and interleave a handshake to renew the session.

Deep packet inspection techniques, though, can easily spot the difference between HTTPS and VPN packets. Stealth is our custom WireGuard-based VPN protocol that uses several technologies to make it much harder to detect and block, including running over an obfuscated TLS tunnel over TCP.

0.0/0 means all trafic gets routed through your wireguard VPN. But you could also only send specific IP's through the VPN. For eg with: 192.168. 1.100/32, 192.168.

The biggest notable differences between WireGuard and OpenVPN are speed and security. While WireGuard is generally faster, OpenVPN provides heavier security. The differences between these two protocols are also what make up their defining features.

The best overall WireGuard alternative is SoftEther VPN. Other similar apps like WireGuard are Twingate, Netgate pfSense, Absolute Secure Access, and OpenVPN Access Server. WireGuard alternatives can be found in Business VPN Software but may also be in Zero Trust Networking Software or Firewall Software.

The biggest notable differences between WireGuard and OpenVPN are speed and security. While WireGuard is generally faster, OpenVPN provides heavier security. The differences between these two protocols are also what make up their defining features.

Compared to IPsec, the WireGuard connection has a 20% lower latency and a 15% higher throughput. When it comes to performance, WireGuard usually performs better than IPSec and even quicker than other VPN protocols like OpenVPN.

For those of you who don't want to read it all: Raw WAN connections are slower than connections on the LAN by only about 13%. Tunneling through ssh and wireguard is slower by about another 30-40%, and wireguard beats ssh head to head by about 35% in both transmit and receive.