CloudFlare Launches "BoringTun" As Rust-Written WireGuard User-Space Implementation

Add CloudFlare to the list of companies interested in WireGuard as an open-source, next-gen secure network tunnel solution. CloudFlare even ended up writing their own user-space implementation of WireGuard in the Rust programming language, meet BoringTun.

BoringTun is a user-space implementation of WireGuard that leverages Rust. On Linux and other platforms, WireGuard has focused on offering kernel drivers while BoringTun is self-contained and running in user-space. CloudFlare took to creating BoringTun as they wanted a user-space solution as not to have to deal with kernel modules or satisfying certain kernel versions. They also wanted cross platform support and for their chosen implementation to be very fast, these choices which led them to writing a Rust-based solution.

BoringTun is being offered under a 3-clause BSD license. The code is up on GitHub.

"WireGuard is an incredible tool and we believe it has a chance of being the defacto standard for VPN-like technologies going forward. We're adding our Rust implementation of WireGuard to the ecosystem and hope people find it useful." More details on the CloudFlare blog.

Exciting times ahead for WireGuard, especially with the kernel implementation possibly coming for Linux 5.2.