BoringTun v0.4 Released For CloudFlare's Rust-Based WireGuard
BoringTun is CloudFlare's WireGuard play and is their own user-space implementation that leverages Rust for enhanced security. BoringTun is open-source and cross-platform with Linux and macOS being the initial targets on the desktop as well as iOS and Android for mobile. BoringTun is published under a 3-clause BSD license and has been verified to work across x86_64 / AArch64 / ARMv7 architectures.
CloudFlare says that BoringTun is deployed on "millions" of iOS and Android devices and also CloudFlare's Linux servers -- it consists of both the user-space boringtun software and the BoringTun library that can be used by client applications.
CloudFlare announced BoringTun prior to WireGuard's module being mainlined in the Linux kernel. Most Linux desktop users / enthusiasts these days seem to be up for that when running on recent versions of the Linux kernel while BoringTun likely still has interest among enterprise users on older enterprise Linux distributions not yet shipping WireGuard support, similarly for some embedded / consumer electronic devices running on older kernels. BoringTun's library support may also continue to be of interest to some developers.
Since the 2019 announcement of BoringTun we haven't heard much from CloudFlare about the project but was surprised to see yesterday that BoringTun v0.4.0 was quietly released. There isn't any change-log and is their only tagged release available, consisting of all the BoringTun work to this point. Since mid-February was an uptick in activity with various fixes landing into BoringTun though that was the first batch of committed work since one commit in December and a few back in November/October. The project sometimes sees no commits in a given month but does seem to be used and relied upon by CloudFlare and other parties.
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