OpenVPN uses TLS. The whole point of WireGuard is to shake off that complex baggage.
I sometimes think Apple removed /dev/tap from iOS because it provided too much potential freedom.
Not every user needs in-kernel performance for their daily routine but there's certainly an argument that every user could use a decent "VPN" that could run on all their computers.
Alas, OpenVPN mindshare is rather strong, to the detriment of existing or future userspace alternatives.
Granted, but this should generally be behind a shared secret HMAC, according to best practices, limiting the scope to those with the key in hand.
> The whole point of WireGuard is to shake off that complex baggage.
That's great, but also has nothing to do with running in-kernel. I'm not ready to give either product a clear pass on their risk profiles.
The end goal ought to be getting more things out-of-ring 0, not adding more things to it -- I'm never going to say that "I'm not concerned" or that "It's a non-issue" (although I will say that I'm a lot more worried about the massive amounts of crap code in WiFi drivers than I am about a VPN implementation, generally speaking).
In the OpenVPN case, numerous vulnerabilities have been limited to only DoS exploits due to the zealous use of assert(); in the kernel case, that brings down your machine, and quite often, assertions are compiled out of the release kernel due to their overhead in critical paths (whether they should be is another question).
We do have ways to tackle the kernel->userspace performance divide when it comes to packet processing, e.g: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=netmap&sektion=4