What is WireGuard?
Also asked as: Is WireGuard safe? · Why do VPNs use WireGuard?
Direct answer
WireGuard is a VPN protocol designed to be small, fast and hard to misconfigure. It uses a fixed set of modern primitives — ChaCha20-Poly1305 for encryption, Curve25519 for key exchange — completes its handshake in one round trip, and is part of the Linux kernel. Most consumer VPN apps, including every VPNmine app, now use it.
Why it is different
Size. WireGuard is a few thousand lines of code, against hundreds of thousands for OpenVPN or IPsec. Less code means fewer places for a bug to hide and a codebase one person can audit.
No cipher negotiation. OpenVPN lets the two ends negotiate from a menu of ciphers, which is where many historical VPN weaknesses lived. WireGuard has one choice of each primitive; if a primitive is ever broken, the protocol version changes.
Reconnects. It is built around keys rather than sessions, so switching from Wi-Fi to mobile data or waking a laptop resumes the tunnel without a new handshake dance.
Is it safe
Its design has been formally analysed and its primitives are the current recommendations of the cryptographic community. The thing to know is that WireGuard itself does not handle user accounts or IP assignment — the provider's app and servers do that around it — so a WireGuard VPN is as private as the provider running the servers.
On VPNmine
Every VPNmine desktop, mobile and TV app uses WireGuard with ChaCha20-Poly1305 and Curve25519 keys. The browser extension is the exception: an extension cannot open a system-wide tunnel, so it proxies through the same network over HTTPS or SOCKS5.
Sources
Related questions
- WireGuard vs OpenVPN: which is better?WireGuard is faster, smaller and reconnects better; OpenVPN is older, bigger and can run over TCP 443. Which to pick, and why VPNmine's apps use WireGuard.
- How does a VPN work?What happens when you press connect: key exchange, encrypted tunnel, a server that forwards your traffic, and why sites see its address, not yours.
- Which VPN protocol does VPNmine use?VPNmine uses WireGuard with ChaCha20-Poly1305 on every desktop, mobile and TV app. The browser extension proxies over HTTPS or SOCKS5 instead. No OpenVPN.
- Does a VPN slow down internet speed?A VPN adds latency from the detour and costs some throughput to encryption. Typical numbers, what makes it worse, and how to get most of your speed back.