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Networking Intermediate

What is WireGuard?

A modern, lightweight VPN protocol that uses state-of-the-art cryptography and minimal code for fast, secure tunneling.

WireGuard is a VPN protocol designed for simplicity and performance. With approximately 4,000 lines of code (compared to OpenVPN's 100,000+), it has a smaller attack surface and is easier to audit. It uses Curve25519 for key exchange, ChaCha20 for encryption, Poly1305 for authentication, and BLAKE2s for hashing. WireGuard operates at the kernel level (built into Linux since 5.6) for high performance, achieving better throughput than IPsec and OpenVPN. Configuration is remarkably simple — each peer has a public/private key pair and a list of allowed IPs. It supports roaming (seamless IP changes) and establishes connections in milliseconds.

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A set of rules that control inbound and outbound traffic at the subnet level, acting as a stateless firewall in cloud and enterprise networks.
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An HTTP mechanism that reuses a single TCP connection for multiple requests, reducing the overhead of establishing new connections.
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The practice of continuously observing network infrastructure to detect failures, performance degradation, and security threats.
Network Packet
A formatted unit of data carried over a network, containing headers with routing information and a payload with the actual data.
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The maximum rate of data transfer across a network connection, measured in bits per second.
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The physical or logical arrangement of nodes and connections in a computer network, such as star, mesh, ring, or bus configurations.
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