Re:WireGuard Gives Linux a Faster, More Secure VPN
by tptacek on Monday March 02, 2020 @11:57AM
(#22466172)
* It uses a single set of well-trusted modern primitives and so avoids the attack surface of negotiation.
* Those primitives are used for a Noise construction, and Noise is itself reasonably well studied and increasingly formalized; we can be somewhat confident WireGuard is skipping over the 2 generations of protocol vulnerabilities SSL/TLS faced.
* Perhaps most importantly, the codebase is tiny and designed to minimize its attack surface; for instance, the protocol itself is designed to be implementable without dynamic memory allocation.
* WireGuard is itself minimal and doesn't implement higher-level features like user management, which means that those features aren't coupled and entangled into the core engine, and can be implemented straightforwardly through a clear interface.
In general, and contra this article, "smaller codebase" usually does mean "more secure".
* Those primitives are used for a Noise construction, and Noise is itself reasonably well studied and increasingly formalized; we can be somewhat confident WireGuard is skipping over the 2 generations of protocol vulnerabilities SSL/TLS faced.
* Perhaps most importantly, the codebase is tiny and designed to minimize its attack surface; for instance, the protocol itself is designed to be implementable without dynamic memory allocation.
* WireGuard is itself minimal and doesn't implement higher-level features like user management, which means that those features aren't coupled and entangled into the core engine, and can be implemented straightforwardly through a clear interface.
In general, and contra this article, "smaller codebase" usually does mean "more secure".