WireGuard® on PIA is out of beta and available to use on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS
In March, Private Internet Access rolled out WireGuard® support to our beta testers on PIA desktop clients and mobile apps. We are proud to announce that WireGuard support is out of beta and available to all of our users now. WireGuard is officially a go on our Windows, Mac, Linux desktop clients as well as our Android & iOS mobile apps. A big thank you to our beta testers for their help in testing our WireGuard implementation.
What is WireGuard?
WireGuard is a relatively new VPN protocol that was first released in 2016. WireGuard development follows the UNIX philosophy which simply stated is: Do one thing simply and do it efficiently. As such, WireGuard is less than 4000 lines of code compared with the decades old OpenVPN which has over 400,000 lines of code.
WireGuard is open source and released to the entire world under the GPLv2 license. Additionally, WireGuard is officially implemented in the Linux kernel now that it has reached version 1.0. What this means in layman’s terms is that WireGuard will eventually be usable on all Linux distributions because it will come “preinstalled.”
For more information on Private Internet Access’s implementation of WireGuard® on our VPN servers, please visit our WireGuide.
How Private Internet Access ensures privacy with WireGuard
WireGuard is ready to go on all of our 3,381 VPN servers spread across our 61 locations in 41 different countries on the PIA network. To ensure the privacy of our users connecting via WireGuard to our VPN servers, Private Internet Access has supplemented the core WireGuard VPN tunneling software with additional protections to ensure that the server-client connection remains private and no IP addresses are leaked. For more information, please refer to our initial WireGuard announcement.
“WireGuard” is a registered trademark of Jason A. Donenfeld.
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34 Comments
PIA running WireGuard uses significantly more CPU than the default setting. I switched to WireGuard on my iphone 6s and observed that PIA is at the top of the battery usage list. With the default setting, PIA does not even show up on the list (<1%).
On my Linux Mint laptop, I observed higher CPU usage that frequently interrupted smooth cursor movement. No problem after switching back.
Thanks so much for your comment,
As WireGuard generally allows faster connections there is more data being sent that needs to be encrypted and there is no ability to downgrade the encryption to optimize for less CPU usage for encryption versus throughput, as a result CPU/battery usage is higher. Feel free to reach out to customer support for help troubleshooting if something else is the cause of your high CPU usage!
Will per app settings be coming to wireguard on android?
Stay tuned for more feature updates!