Performance of open source virtual private networks

Sammanfattning

In a post COVID society the practice of companies allowing hybrid work from home has increased. The demand of reaching internal resources securely from home has thus become more prevalent. A VPN solution can provide the necessary functionality in order to achieve this goal. The configuration of a home office can, however, differ significantly among employees, particularly with respect to the operating systems employed. This study aims to answer the question how performance has evolved on different releases of OpenVPN and WireGuard on contemporary operating systems. Related research describes how WireGuard since its inception in 2015 has been the fastest VPN on the market due to its light code-base. OpenVPN has recently released new features which increases performance to a degree of which it can rival the performance of WireGuard. One such feature is Data Channel Offload (DCO). The results of this experiment finds that, historically, WireGuard has provided better performance in terms of throughput and CPU utilization but DCO has diminished this gap by allowing OpenVPN to work in kernel space. This provides near WireGuard levels of performance. In order to determine if the possibility to work in kernel space is the factor which makes WireGuard more performant, WireGuard is also tested with two user space implementations. The throughput performance of this user space implementation is equal to that of WireGuard in kernel space. The CPU load is, however, affected in a negative manner.