The release of WireGuard earlier this year was one of the biggest things to happen to the VPN industry in a long time, and Google has now added support for the new protocol to the next version of Android. WireGuard, which was created by Jason A. Donenfeld of Edge Security, uses cutting-edge cryptography to provide users with the highest level of privacy, security, and speed. The new protocol is faster than existing VPN protocols and also contains only 4.000 lines of code compared to OpenVPN's 100.000 lines of code, making it easy to review and audit. Right after version 1.0.0 of the protocol was released last March, Linus Torvalds added it to the Linux kernel and made it available in Linux 5.6. Since Android is also based on Linux, it makes sense that Google would want to bring native WireGuard support to its mobile operating system by adding it to Android 5.4's Linux Kernel 12 tree.
Add WireGuard to Android
With each new version of Android, Google forges each version of the Linux kernel to include "patches of interest to the Android community that have not been merged into LTS (Mainline or Long Term Supported) kernels." These kernels are known as common Android kernels and make up the Linux kernel that ships with Android devices. As Google releases new versions of Android, the search giant supports multiple versions of the Linux kernel. For example, Linux kernel versions 4.14 and 4.19 run Android 11, while versions 4.19 and 5.4 will ship with Android 12. Today's flagship Android smartphones run on a fork of the Linux 4.19 kernel but with the upcoming version. Starting with Android 12, new devices will run on top of the Linux 5.4 kernel, which includes support for WireGuard. Several new commits were recently added to the Android Common Kernel Android 12-5.4 tree and one of those commits was for the WireGuard VPN protocol. Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman explained in his commit that WireGuard will be available in Android 12 as a simple network device driver, saying: “This commit implements WireGuard as a simple network device driver, accessible in the form Common RTNL used by virtual network drivers. It uses the udp_tunnel, GRO, GSO, NAPI APIs, and the usual set of network subsystem APIs. "We will likely know more about WireGuard support in the latest version of Android once we get closer to the official release of Android 12.- We've also highlighted the best VPN services