Post-quantum WireGuard
Open accessAbstract
In this paper we present PQ-WireGuard, a post-quantum variant of the handshake in the WireGuard VPN protocol (NDSS 2017). Unlike most previous work on post-quantum security for real-world protocols, this variant does not only consider post-quantum confidentiality (or forward secrecy) but also post-quantum authentication. To achieve this, we replace the Diffie-Hellman-based handshake by a more generic approach only using key-encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs). We establish security of PQ-WireGuard, adapting the security proofs for WireGuard in the symbolic model and in the standard model to our construction. We then instantiate this generic construction with concrete post-quantum secure KEMs, which we carefully select to achieve high security and speed. We demonstrate competitiveness of PQ-WireGuard presenting extensive bench-marking results comparing to widely deployed VPN solutions.
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Classic McEliece's profile could have advantages in settings where a public key is reused many times and does not need to be retransmitted for each new communication.
“However, its profile could have some advantages in settings where a public key is reused many times and does not need to be retransmitted for each new communication [70].”
From Status report on the fourth round of the NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization process (2025) · cites this paper as [70]
The supplied passages, including those labeled Abstract (page unavailable), contain bibliographic information rather than discussion of Classic McEliece. Searches for “McEliece,” “key reuse,” and retransmission found no passage addressing the claimed advantage, so our copy cannot verify it. (LLM, conf=0.70)
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Algorithms for quantum computation: discrete logarithms and factoring
Shor, P. W. (2002) · Proceedings 35th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science · doi:10.1109/sfcs.1994.365700 · Cited by 8,713 · see citing works
Polynomial-time algorithms for prime factorization and discrete logarithms on a quantum computer
Shor, P. W. (1997) · SIAM Journal on Computing · doi:10.1137/s0097539795293172 · Cited by 8,472 · see citing works
ChaCha20 and Poly1305 for IETF Protocols
Nir, Y., & Langley, A. (2018) · doi:10.17487/rfc8439 · Cited by 178 · see citing works
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Status report on the second round of the NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization process
Moody, D., Alagic, G., Apon, D. C., Cooper, D. A., Dang, Q. H., Kelsey, J. M., Liu, Y.-K., Miller, C. A., Peralta, R. C., Perlner, R. A., et al. (2020) · doi:10.6028/nist.ir.8309 · Cited by 296 · see citing works
Status report on the third round of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization process
Alagic, G., Apon, D., Cooper, D., Dang, Q., Dang, T., Kelsey, J., Lichtinger, J., Liu, Y.-K., Miller, C., Moody, D., et al. (2022) · doi:10.6028/nist.ir.8413-upd1 · Cited by 301 · see citing works
Status report on the fourth round of the NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization process
Alagic, G., Bros, M., Ciadoux, P., Cooper, D., Dang, Q., Dang, T., Kelsey, J., Lichtinger, J., Liu, Y.-K., Miller, C., et al. (2025) · doi:10.6028/nist.ir.8545 · Cited by 128 · see citing works
Szymanski, T. H. (2022) · IEEE Access · doi:10.1109/access.2022.3169137 · Cited by 59 · see citing works
- Authors
- Hülsing, A., Ning, K.-C., Schwabe, P., Weber, F. J., & Zimmermann, P. R.
- Affiliations
- Eindhoven University of Technology (NL)
- KPN (Netherlands) (NL)
- Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (DE)
- Delft University of Technology (NL)
- Venue
- 2021 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2021-05
- Pages
- 304-321
- ISSN
- 1081-6011 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3023890793
- Cited by
- 75
- References
- 3
- Citations by year
- 2026: 13 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 14 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 3
- FWCI
- 5.31
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- research.tue.nl
- Locations
- IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) (publishedVersion)
- TU/e Research Portal (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- Radboud Repository (Radboud University) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- European Commission
- Ministry of Economic Affairs
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Cryptography and Data Security
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Advanced Authentication Protocols Security
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Quantum Information and Cryptography
- Keywords
- post-quantum cryptography, WireGuard, key encapsulation mechanism, forward secrecy, symbolic models, Standard Model, benchmarking
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