NordVPN is now testing another advanced cybersecurity solution. The firm now testing with select clients the adoption of WireGuard – the protocol that appears to be the next big thing in online security..
“WireGuard is a relatively simple yet extremely fast and modern open-source protocol that utilizes state-of-the-art cryptography,” says Laura Tyrell, Press Officer at NordVPN. “Even though WireGuard is still at the early stage of development, at NordVPN we’re always open for innovations, new trends, and R&D breakthroughs. We believe that WireGuard may help us remain the world’s most advanced VPN service in the future.”
Even with WireGuard is still under development it offers a level of simplicity, ease of implementation and management are likely to surpass OpenVPN. Plus, WireGuard’s encryption speed is much fast.
WireGuard uses state-of-the-art cryptography modules. A whitepaper published by the protocol’s developers says:
“The virtual tunnel interface is based on a proposed fundamental principle of secure tunnels: an association between a peer public key and a tunnel source IP address. It uses a single round trip key exchange, based on NoiseIK, and handles all session creation transparently to the user using a novel timer state machine mechanism. Short pre-shared static keys – Curve25519 points – are used for mutual authentication in the style of OpenSSH.”
The whitepaper continues:
“The protocol provides strong perfect forward secrecy in addition to a high degree of identity hiding. Transport speed is accomplished using ChaCha20Poly1305 authenticated-encryption for encapsulation of packets in UDP.”
Again WireGuard protocol is not yet publicly available at NordVPN. They are just conducting proof of concept testing at this time.