Comment by lmeyerov

3 years ago

Having come from a community that is often cleanup duty for unfounded claims (PL) and having to spend ~decade+ $100M+ efforts to do so... I didn't realize that about wireguard. That's pretty strange to read in 2022.

To be clear, WireGuard is a good VPN protocol, and definitely a secure design. I wouldn't recommend another over it. It's just the initial claims of security in the NDSS paper were incompatible with its design.

  • I'm sure it's a pretty good one, but it's quite hard to trust more than that both on the design + impl side if you ever have tried to verify (vs just test) such a system. Think the years of pain for something much more trivial like paxos + an impl of it.

    In this case, looks like the community does value backing up its claims, and the protocol is verified: https://www.wireguard.com/formal-verification/ . Pretty awesome! The implementation itself seems to be written unsafely, so TBD there.