TY - GEN
T1 - A Performance Comparison of WireGuard and OpenVPN
AU - Mackey, Steven
AU - Mihov, Ivan
AU - Nosenko, Alex
AU - Vega, Francisco
AU - Cheng, Yuan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 ACM.
PY - 2020/3/16
Y1 - 2020/3/16
N2 - A fundamental problem that confronts virtual private network (VPN) applications is the overhead on throughput, ease of deployment and use, and overall utilization. WireGuard is a recently introduced light and secure cross-platform VPN application. It aims to simplify the process of setting up a secure connection while utilizing the multi-threading capability and minimizing the use of bandwidth. There have been several follow-up studies on WireGuard since its birth, most of which focus on the security analysis of the protocol. Despite the author's claim that WireGuard has impressive wins over OpenVPN and IPsec, there is no rigorous analysis of its performance to date. This paper presents a performance comparison of WireGuard and its main rival OpenVPN on various metrics. We construct an automated test framework and deploy it on a total of eight nodes, including remote AWS instances and local virtual machines. Our test results clearly show two main edges that WireGuard has over OpenVPN, its performance on multi-core machines and its light codebase.
AB - A fundamental problem that confronts virtual private network (VPN) applications is the overhead on throughput, ease of deployment and use, and overall utilization. WireGuard is a recently introduced light and secure cross-platform VPN application. It aims to simplify the process of setting up a secure connection while utilizing the multi-threading capability and minimizing the use of bandwidth. There have been several follow-up studies on WireGuard since its birth, most of which focus on the security analysis of the protocol. Despite the author's claim that WireGuard has impressive wins over OpenVPN and IPsec, there is no rigorous analysis of its performance to date. This paper presents a performance comparison of WireGuard and its main rival OpenVPN on various metrics. We construct an automated test framework and deploy it on a total of eight nodes, including remote AWS instances and local virtual machines. Our test results clearly show two main edges that WireGuard has over OpenVPN, its performance on multi-core machines and its light codebase.
KW - openvpn
KW - performance analysis
KW - virtual private networks
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85083369212&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3374664.3379532
DO - 10.1145/3374664.3379532
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85083369212
T3 - CODASPY 2020 - Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy
SP - 162
EP - 164
BT - CODASPY 2020 - Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 10th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy, CODASPY 2020
Y2 - 16 March 2020 through 18 March 2020
ER -