WireGuard

This is the first post of several. Next posts will focus on running WireGuard inside a Docker container on amd64 Linux and a Raspberry Pi.

I’ve been running WireGuard for a few months now and I’ve been loving it.

I first started using it about a year ago when in China — OpenVPN was once again being actively blocked and it was driving me nuts. Overnight I set up a DigitalOcean server in Singapore and ran WireGuard from it — both my phone and laptop were able to actively bypass the GFW and (at that time) surf the internet freely once more. As WireGuard gains popularity, I am sure the GFW will start detecting it — it’s a quiet but not a stealthy protocol.

Since then I’ve dug quite a bit deeper in WireGuard and am really looking forward to what it’s going to bring.

WireGuard differentiates itself to be an extremely simple VPN server (which can make getting started and debugging a bit more challenging) — but it wants to seamlessly work together with existing tools. One of the main features still missing is for example running a DHCP server on the server and dynamically assigning IPs (like oVPN does).

It’s also pretty cool because any node can both be a server and a client at the same time. In my setup I am running two servers: one running at home in Singapore on a RPi4 (1Gbit fiber connection) and one on a virtual machine in Amsterdam (1Gbit as well). The RPis at my parents are connected to the server in Amsterdam, my iPad and phones are connected to the server in Singapore. If I am in Europe I might switch over and let my iDevices connect to the AMS server instead.

The example above clearly shows speed gains by cloaking the traffic in UDP packets. The shared folder has only two nodes (sender and receiver) and shows several big files being transferred from Amsterdam to Singapore. Resilio Sync uses the Bittorrent protocol, something ISPs generally hate and tend to slow down as much as they can — thanks Starhub.

Wireguard also allows the client to decide what to route through the server: only the VPN LAN traffic, or a whole subnet, or 0.0.0.0/0? So for my iPhone I for example route all traffic through VPN to avoid hotel/airport/… WiFi’s to mine/log/scan my data. For my laptop I have two configs, one to only connect to the LAN, but another that routes all my traffic through the VPN if I want to avoid exposure or circumvent censoring.

Note that I am not running WireGuard to remain anonymous and I’ll definitely leak some information — just trying to minimise and remain in control of what I leak. This is not a Tor replacement.