Performance Comparison of VPN Solutions

Abstract

Virtual Private Networks (VPN) is the state-of-the-art method to build secure connections between remote hosts over public networks. In times of high-speed connections to the internet, a need for personal information security and business cases, like cloud computing, high data throughput and a stable connection are increasingly important. Benchmarks of VPN solutions have been discussed in related work, but the data is quite old or uses other setups. Furthermore, we noticed that the benchmarks from the WireGuard whitepaper seem unrealistic, even if we take protocol overhead into account. In this work, we have decided to conduct VPN benchmarks ourselves. In the following paragraphs we describe our setup and look at three heavily used VPN solutions: OpenVPN, IPsec and WireGuard.