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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.

Related Terms

DNS Record Types
Different types of DNS entries that map domain names to various information like IP addresses, mail servers, and verification strings.
DNS over HTTPS (DoH)
A protocol that encrypts DNS queries by sending them over HTTPS, preventing eavesdropping and manipulation of DNS traffic.
HTTP/HTTPS
The protocol used for transferring web pages and data between browsers and servers, with HTTPS adding encryption.
Network Monitoring
The practice of continuously observing network infrastructure to detect failures, performance degradation, and security threats.
Multicast
A network communication method that sends data to multiple recipients simultaneously without duplicating packets for each recipient.
IP Address
A unique numerical label assigned to each device on a computer network for identification and communication.
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