Paper 2019/482 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2019/482 ↗

Tiny WireGuard Tweak

Jacob Appelbaum
Chloe Martindale
Peter Wu
Abstract

We show that a future adversary with access to a quantum computer, historic network traffic protected by WireGuard, and knowledge of a WireGuard user's long-term static public key can likely decrypt many of the WireGuard user's historic messages. We propose a simple, efficient alteration to the WireGuard protocol that mitigates this vulnerability, with negligible additional computational and memory costs. Our changes add zero additional bytes of data to the wire format of the WireGuard protocol. Our alteration provides transitional post-quantum security for any WireGuard user who does not publish their long-term static public key -- it should be exchanged out-of-band.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Preprint.
History
2019-05-13: last updated
2019-05-13: published
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2019/482
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2019/482,
      author = {Jacob Appelbaum and Chloe Martindale and Peter Wu},
      title = {Tiny WireGuard Tweak},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2019/482},
      year = {2019},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/482}
}
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