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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

BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)
The routing protocol that makes the internet work by exchanging routing information between autonomous systems.
HTTP Keep-Alive
An HTTP mechanism that reuses a single TCP connection for multiple requests, reducing the overhead of establishing new connections.
Bandwidth
The maximum rate of data transfer across a network connection, measured in bits per second.
Network Topology
The physical or logical arrangement of nodes and connections in a computer network, such as star, mesh, ring, or bus configurations.
SSL/TLS Certificate
A digital certificate that authenticates a website identity and enables encrypted HTTPS connections.
HTTPS Everywhere
The practice of securing all web traffic with TLS encryption, ensuring data integrity and privacy between browsers and servers.
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