VPN providers are currently working to add support for the WireGuard protocol to their services and hide.me is the latest one to do so.
WireGuard has taken the VPN industry by storm as it offers a number of advantages, including improved speeds and increased privacy, over existing VPN protocols such as OpenVPN and IPSec.
After much internal testing, hide.me has decided that its users will also benefit from the addition of this new protocol, according to the company's CEO and founder, Sebastian Schaub who explained why, saying:
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“WireGuard has certainly made the VPN industry stand up and take notice in recent times. After much discussion and testing we have decided WireGuard support would be something our users would benefit hugely from. As a VPN service that often leads the way in terms of new features and functionality for our users, we believe that WireGuard is a part of the future of internet security, especially in the VPN space. Now is the time to bring this to our users.”
Implementing WireGuard
As WireGuard is more of a basic cryptosystem, a lot of the implementation is left up to the VPN provider. Since the protocol does not have any key exchange method, hide.me's engineers managed to implement the key exchange into its HTTPS service. This means that the key exchange process for WireGuard is completely automated which makes using it seamless.
Every time a user connects to a hide.me server, a new WireGuard public key is generated on their device. During the key exchange with the server, the private key never leaves their device and only the public part of it does. To ensure that VPN connections are doubly encrypted, the company's servers generate an ephemeral session shared key.
Hide.me does not store or log users' public keys or shared keys and this is all possible as a result of the dynamic nature of its WireGuard implementation. However, the service's WireGuard implementation is still in the beta phase so users may run into bugs and other anomalies which will be improved over time as the company evolves its support of the new protocol.
In the coming weeks, hide.me also plans to publish and open source its Linux CLI WireGuard client which will allow its customers using Linux to take advantage of its implementation.
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