Live data from Hacker News

WireGuard: Next Generation Kernel Network Tunnel [pdf]

wireguard.com

1–10 of 26 posts

Re: WireGuard: Next Generation Kernel Network Tunnel [pdf]

#5
post #3

Looking at the design of WireGuard it seems relatively obvious. Is there a reason it took this long to get such a basic solution?

It took that long for someone with the skill and interest to get annoyed by the status quo, and sit down and develop a bare-bones protocol that does just what is needed.

Cryptographic knowledge is much more available today than it was 17 years ago when OpenVPN started, so that has probably helped. Some of the constructs used in Wireguard (such as ChaCha20Poly1305) are also quite recent, and didn't exist when OpenVPN started.

Re: WireGuard: Next Generation Kernel Network Tunnel [pdf]

#8
post #3

Looking at the design of WireGuard it seems relatively obvious. Is there a reason it took this long to get such a basic solution?

Simple is harder than complex, as always.

I really wish more people understood this. Over-engineering is the plague of modern software.

Re: WireGuard: Next Generation Kernel Network Tunnel [pdf]

#9
I'm a little off-put by the creator's attitude towards clients he didn't have a hand in making[0]. And the fact that 5 months ago he said we'd have a windows client around the corner, and yet after taking a cursory look at the two projects, development on one appears to be stalled, and the other still can't support windows, doesn't bode well.

I'm insanely impressed that he's come up with something so good, and I have no knowledge of cryptography and writing truly secure code, so I don't like to complain like this... but it would be nice to have a real timeline so that we can make our own decision about whether we want to use the closed source alternatives.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16515637

Re: WireGuard: Next Generation Kernel Network Tunnel [pdf]

#10
post #9

I'm a little off-put by the creator's attitude towards clients he didn't have a hand in making[0]. And the fact that 5 months ago he said we'd have a windows client around the corner, and yet after taking a cursory look at the two projects, development on one appears to be stalled, and the other still can't support windows, doesn't bode well. I'm insanely impressed that he's come up with something so good, and I have…

Your comment is very misleading. Reading what you linked to, creator has the (extremely legitimate) concern of users relying on closed source implementations of WireGuard. Which is not at all the same as "clients he didn't have a hand in making"
Post reply on HN