Re: Is there a way to use wireguard as a non-encrypted VPN?

["Fredrik Strömberg" <stromberg@mullvad.net>]

On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 10:30 AM <mike@pmfarmwald.com> wrote:
>
> I have some older routers that run OpenWRT just fine, but are a bit slow at
> Wireguard (3-5 MBytes/s for SMB transfers) and which are too slow for
> playing HD movies.
> For these routers/uses I don't care about security, I just want a VPN to
> tunnel (thru Comcast, and other ISPs that block lots of ports.)
> If there was a way to use Wiireguard with encryption disabled, I'm pretty
> sure my performance would be closer to 20-50 MB/s which would be more than
> adequate.
> Thanks.
> Mike Farmwald
>

Hi Mike,

No, WireGuard does not and will never support your use case of
disabling encryption.

If you are able to, buy a router that is powerful enough to do
WireGuard at your preferred throughput. Otherwise you would need to
use other encapsulation methods. OpenVPN with hardware AES
acceleration might work (if your routers support that). However
OpenVPN lives in userspace so it needs to do a memory copy from kernel
to userspace for each packet. I'm not sure how the performance will
work out in practice.

If you look at other methods you might want to consider the state of
its maintenance. PPTP code is likely to be very old and unmaintained
for instance. Your router might very well end up hacked.

Cheers,
Fredrik Stromberg