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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

HTTP/HTTPS
The protocol used for transferring web pages and data between browsers and servers, with HTTPS adding encryption.
HTTP Keep-Alive
An HTTP mechanism that reuses a single TCP connection for multiple requests, reducing the overhead of establishing new connections.
TCP/IP
The fundamental communication protocol suite of the internet that defines how data is packaged, addressed, transmitted, and received.
ARP (Address Resolution Protocol)
A protocol that maps IP addresses to physical MAC addresses on a local network segment.
DNS (Domain Name System)
A hierarchical naming system that translates human-readable domain names into IP addresses.
QoS (Quality of Service)
A set of techniques for managing network traffic to prioritize certain types of data and ensure performance for critical applications.
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