L2TP vs SoftEther vs WireGuard vs OpenVPN: Which VPN is Right for You?

6 minutes

Dwijadas Dey

Introduction

A VPN or Virtual Private Network is a technology for creating an encrypted and secured connection over an unsecured network. A VPN can hide a user's location and identity for greater privacy and autonomy and allows to access restricted content bypassing censorship.

There are a few handfuls of free and open-source VPN protocols on the market that you can choose according to your requirements. Each of these VPNs is divergent with little commonality. Therefore few factors like speed, security, ease of setup, and scalability influence the outcome of choosing a VPN.

In this article, we will compare the top four free and open-source VPN protocols: OpenVPN, SoftEther VPN, WireGuard VPN, and L2TP. We'll also discuss various factors to consider when selecting an one from this group.

OpenVPN

OpenVPN is a free and open-source VPN project developed in the year 2001 to facilitate secured connectivity by encrypting data between devices. Since then OpenVPN has come a long way and transformed itself into a robust VPN provider by enabling VPN tunnels for data, providing superior encrypted communication to mitigate the risk of potential eavesdropping threats.

To encrypt data and communication, OpenVPN uses a bunch of advanced algorithms such as AES-256. The AES-256 algorithm replaces, combines, and transports data in separate blocks with different keys resulting in a top-notch data encryption algorithm even today.

Moreover, OpenVPN has two distinct encryption modes - CBC(Cipher Block Chaining) and GCM(Galois Counter mode). In CBC mode each block needs to be processed before data can be encrypted, making it immune to attacks like frequency analysis. However, this adds to the overhead of requiring serial encryption.

The GCP mode is designed to turn block ciphers into stream ciphers in which each block is encrypted with a random value from the key stream making it faster and offering more security than the CBC mode.

On the authentication scheme, OpenVPN utilizes a wide range of authentication protocols, the most popular among them are TLS and HMAC. The TLS protocol is widely used to encrypt data exchanged over a network and requires both parties to share and verify their certificates. The HMAC protocol(Hash-based Message Authentication Code) works similarly but uses a hash function instead of establishing a connection to encrypt data.

The OpenVPN offers two types of connections - TCP and UDP. While UDP is faster, TCP is reliable but adds a little overhead in terms of speed.

OpenVPN is good in terms of encryption and authentication protocols but bad in performance. However, it is possible to improve the performance with proper configuration settings and by choosing the right protocols.

Another factor for choosing OpenVPN is that it supports various systems, including routers with firmware like OpenWrt, and DD-WRT, and network appliances like OPNSense and pfSense.

WireGuard VPN

WireGuard VPN is a relatively new VPN protocol that is good in terms of security and way ahead of other VPN protocols in terms of speed. The modern cryptographic algorithm WireGuard VPN uses makes it efficient, and fast and has a smaller codebase which is easier to maintain and audit.

The state-of-the-art modern encryption algorithm WireGuard VPN uses to encrypt data in a stream rather than block format as with the case of OpenVPN which uses AES-256 block cipher. While the AES-256 block cipher is relatively secure, it cannot match the speed offered by the ChaCha20, Poly1305 stream cipher employed by WireGuard VPN.

The WireGuard VPN can provide peer-to-peer connectivity (Mesh VPN) as compared to the client-server model used by OpenVPN. In the WireGuard mesh VPN, all the peers are connected to make it look like a star topology and each peer has a wireguard on it with an option of full mesh or partial mesh.

The other connectivity types offered by WireGuard VPN that you can try out are Site to Site VPN (or LAN to LAN) and VPN to LAN (Client/Server).

WireGuard is good for personal use or for site-to-site VPN. The downside of WireGuard is that it does not support username and password type logins and needs to be configured on a per-device basis. Therefore it is not suitable for use as a corporate remote access VPN where a large number of users needs to be configured separately.

Moreover, WireGuard is relatively new and demands regular security audits against emerging threats. It needs a proper analysis and study to deploy WireGuard VPN to protect highly sensitive information.

Read this article if you're keen on establishing a WireGuard VPN server.

SoftEther VPN

SoftEther(Software Ethernet) VPN is an open-source VPN protocol that is fast, reliable, and very powerful. Similarly to WireGuard VPN, SoftEther VPN is incredibly fast and employs AES-256(OpenVPN) and ChaCha20(WireGuard) encryption algorithms to secure data transmissions.

The unique feature of SoftEther VPN is that the tunneling and encapsulation are carried out at Layer 2 i.e. Ethernet. What it means is that layer 3 switching and network adapter switching are implemented by software and hence the name is soft(ware) ether(net) or soft ethernet .

The SoftEther's speed is derived from a more effective tunneling protocol instead of the encryption techniques. It uses SSTP (Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol) which encrypts data using SSL/TLS and allows it to bypass the firewall more effectively.

The SoftEther VPN is flexible and supports multiple VPN protocols such as IPSec and L2TP. While the L2TP VPN protocol is extremely reliable, IPSec encrypts traffic at the network layer which implies everything including the IP address is also encrypted making tracing and decryption of traffic extremely difficult.

While SoftEther VPN is fast and extremely powerful, it has some drawbacks - the prominent one is that it is complex and needs skills of higher order to manage it. Moreover, the documentation and community support are not as good as OpenVPN.

L2TP VPN

L2TP/IPSec (Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol) VPN is one of the oldest VPN protocols developed by Microsoft, Cisco, and a few other network equipment manufacturers way back in 1999. This protocol is the extension of the Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) and establishes connectivity between the L2TP server and your devices without authentication and encryption.

The encryption and authentication of L2TP VPN is usually paired with Internet Protocol Security(IPsec) which also govern the data transfer between endpoints of the L2TP tunnel. The L2TP tunnel is an extended PPP tunnel but runs on top of the L2TP layer 2 of two endpoints and the communication within the tunnel is encrypted by the IPSec transport connection at the IP layer.

The L2TP/IPSec VPN can handle both IPV4 and IPV6 and is compatible with different operating systems and routers. However, the L2TP has some drawbacks. First of all, L2TP is slow and designed to create a tunnel between endpoints without encryption. This makes it highly susceptible to various sorts of data integrity. Unlike other VPNs, L2TP has limitations to bypass firewalls and circumvent network restrictions.

The chart given next outlines all the elements to consider when comparing OpenVPN, SoftEther, WireGuard, and L2TP VPNs.

Conclusion

There is no VPN that has all the traits to become the best VPN protocol. All the VPN protocols discussed in this post has its advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, choosing the right VPN depends on your requirements and proper analysis of several factors like speed, security, and many more things. This post's comparative review of four VPN protocols - OpenVPN, WireGuard, SoftEther, and L2TP - will assist you in selecting the right VPN.

The VPN provides you with animosity and online freedom. However ISPs and Government around the World have tools to identify and block VPN traffic. For example, the Great Firewall of China uses a deep packet inspection(DPI) tool to sniff network packets to detect, categorize, and block VPN traffic.

To bypass the sniffing of packets by the deep packet inspection(DPI) tool, an open-source encrypted proxy tool called Shadowsocks is used to access restricted content. However, Shadowsocks is not a VPN protocol, and how Shadowsocks functions is different from the traditional VPNs.