This post makes it look like there’s something serious ly wrong with openvpn, but it’s just them not wanting to deal with it and deprecating it.
Oh well, guess Ill put a note not to use them. My country blocks VPN protocols and wg specifically, so for my usecase I need as many protocols supported as possible, preferrably mimicking other innocuous protocols.
mullvad and windscribe are the only two i support <3
Do you have a stance on IVPN?
I’ve had an active iVPN sub for almost 8 years now. Cannot say anything bad about them whatsoever
why yall need a vpn?
Privacy
And justified paranoia
Because OpenVPN is fiddly to set up and modern Wireguard setups seem to scale well enough.
EDIT: it’s been pointed out to me that using NetworkManager for Wireguard setup is shit. Instead use nmcli, this seems to have solved my problem.
I’m using Bazzite Linux with KDE, and for me Wireguard setup is copy/pasting several bits of information on multiple settings pages. OpenVPN is just downloading a single config file and inputting my user/pass.
Also, Wireguard disconnects so often, no matter which distro I’m on, that it’s a pain in the butt having to reconnect a few times an hour. Not to mention that I can’t have it set to autoconnect on login, or my internet doesn’t work until I disconnect and reconnect.
Bummer. For whatever reason I always get much better speeds on openvpn servers.
That’s not something you hear very often.
Sounds like an issue with your network or routes. By design, WG is faster.
That’s very strange. WireGuard was specifically created in part because of speed limitations.
WG was always so much better anyway.
Not sure about that. I set up a wg vpn server on a system which then became unresponsive whenever wg was fully saturating the network. Turns out there is apparently no way to throttle or prioritize a wg server, the only way I could think of would be to dedicate a vm to solely the wg vpn and throttle that vm in its networking.
I instead switched to openvpn which can simply be throttled via a line in its configuration.Besides that missing feature, openvpn also doesn’t require figuring out the right iptables commands to verbatim paste into its config as startup and shutdown commands. Setting it up was way easier than wg (though openvpn too wasn’t exactly user-friendly).
WG to me seems too clunky and unfinished for more mainstream usage, though I am sure it wouldn’t be an issue for a large commercial user like mullvad that will have no issue with all that.
Regarding link saturation - have you tried tc/wondershaper? https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/28198/how-to-limit-network-bandwidth#28203
Iptables commands - that was needed at the very launch of wg, I’ve not had to deal with it for some time now.
Personal/commercial use - I’m on a completely opposite side. It’s perfect for personal use, but its lack of dhcp support makes me question its capability in a commercial setting. Many providers offer it, so clearly that’s not an insurmountable task, but I’m still curious how they sort out their backend.
I only have one problem with this. When they say wireguard being crypto opinionated is a good thing. I am weary to agree with that statement entirely.
While it is good for stability (only one stack to support and get right, and to be secure and efficient) I do wonder about overall and future security. Saying “You must use this specific cipher suite because we think it’s the best” is a bit of a dangerous road to take.
I say this just because Curve 25519 is considered a very secure elliptic curve, to the best of my very limited knowledge on this subject. But we had a certain dual elliptic curve pseudo random number generator was pushed as “best practice” (NIST backed) some time ago, which didn’t turn out so well, even omitting possible conspiracy scenarios, it had known weaknesses even before it was recommended. [1]
Since then I’ve generally not been a huge fan of being given one option as “the right way” when it comes to cryptography. Even if it is the “best” it gives one target to try to find a weakness in, rather than many.
I say all this as a wireguard user, it’s a great, fast and reliable VPN. I just have concerns when the choice of using other algorithms and especially putting my own chosen chain together is taken away. Because it puts the exact same target to break on every one of us, rather than having to work out how to break multiple methods and algorithms and multiple combinations.
I think the idea behind opinionated cryptography is not only the idea of “We think this is the best, so you have to use it”, but most importantly it removes all requirements of the protocol supporting cipher negotiation. This makes the protocol much simpler, easier to audit and as a result more secure. And if the cryptography in the protocol ever shows a weakness, then Wireguard v2 needs to be released as a breaking change. See all the SSL/TLS versions
Yep. I entirely agree about the good points. I am just always weary about removing options like this, regardless of intention.
I’d be fine if for example I’m running my own wireguard implementation, I could choose the suite to use, not negotiate anything and ensure my client has the same configuration.
I’d probably not use it, but I like the option, and knowing that anyone that wants to try to break this now also needs to guess what options I’m running.
