Auditing WireGuard means reviewing one config file, not a sprawling codebase

Access control in this setup is the list of [Peer] blocks. Each block pairs a public key with an AllowedIPs value, and in the author's production file that value is one host route, AllowedIPs = 10.0.0.2/32 ^[12]. The /32 tells WireGuard that key may use exactly that address, and every peer needs its own entry ^[12]. So an audit is: open /etc/wireguard/wg0.conf, count the peers, check each address against the person who is supposed to own it ^[11]. Enrolment is a key pair generated on the client and a public key pasted on the server, with no certificate authority anywhere in it ^[16].

Two lines in the same file are plumbing. PostUp and PostDown insert iptables FORWARD rules and a nat POSTROUTING MASQUERADE bound to a named egress interface ^[13]. That name is per-host. The post says to check with `ip link` before editing, that Debian 12 installs typically show ens3 or enp1s0, and that it is "almost never eth0" ^[14], which will be news to anyone still pasting configs from 2016. Get that name wrong and the handshake completes but the traffic never gets forwarded.

The security argument leans on size: roughly 4,000 lines for WireGuard against closer to 70,000 for OpenVPN's core daemon ^[4]. That is 17.5 to 1, or about 6 percent ^[5]. One side of the comparison is a whole implementation and the other is one daemon inside a larger project, so the ratio only transfers to your risk assessment if both were counted at the same boundary ^[4]. The post cites the 2021 Cure53 audit and a Trail of Bits review as finding no critical vulnerabilities ^[6].

Speed is the weaker half of the case. The post asserts WireGuard is faster than OpenVPN on the same hardware; it does not publish the test ^[7]. For that to mean anything on a VPS relay you would need the hardware, the link speed and the traffic mix it was measured on.

Adoption costs you key handling. The author names manual key management as the trade-off and puts the ceiling at teams under 20 people ^[10]. Every new laptop is a key pair generated locally and another [Peer] block on the server ^[16][12]. He rejected OpenVPN for certificate management, a larger attack surface and slower performance on low-end hardware, and IPsec/IKEv2 because debugging its failures often requires deep protocol knowledge ^[8][9]. "For small businesses that cannot afford enterprise security teams, choosing audited software with a minimal codebase is one of the few concrete security decisions they can make," he wrote ^[19].

The prerequisites are a server with a static public IP, UDP 51820 open, SSH access, a decision on whether all traffic or only the internal network routes through the tunnel, and a backup access plan if the tunnel breaks ^[17]. The server side is Debian 12 on a VPS in Italy, picked for a predictable release cycle and five years of security updates, with rolling releases kept off anything client-facing ^[18]. WireGuard has been in the mainline Linux kernel since 5.6, so there is no out-of-tree module to rebuild after an update ^[2]. The tunnel subnet is 10.0.0.0/24, and the post tells you to move to something like 10.100.0.0/24 if the office already uses it ^[15].