This holiday season, we are giving back to organizations that are furthering our shared cause of online privacy and security. You can support WireGuard’s work by directly donating to their project (link below) or participating in the associated ProtonMail Lifetime account charity auction.

Participate in the charity auction

Learn more about this campaign

We built ProtonVPN because we saw a need for a simple, secure, and technically robust free VPN solution that could meet the needs of activists, dissidents, and journalists around the world. Today, millions of people use ProtonVPN to improve their privacy and security and access geo-restricted or censored content.

As we look to the future of ProtonVPN, we will continue to improve the service with new technologies that offer better user experience, stability, and security. We believe WireGuard, a new open-source VPN protocol currently in development, not only aligns with our values but also meets our technical requirements.

What is WireGuard®?

WireGuard® is a next-generation secure tunnelling protocol designed with high performance and security in mind. The protocol uses modern cryptography that delivers strong security and the cryptographic constructions used by the protocol have been formally verified by a number of research groups. The general consensus is that WireGuard is highly robust.

The lead developer, Jason Donenfeld, started the project in 2015, and since then it has been entirely community driven. Financial support comes from individual donors, nonprofits, and tech companies that see promise in the software.

WireGuard is considerably simpler than its predecessors, such as IPsec and OpenVPN, consisting of just a few thousand lines of code. This makes it much easier for admins and users alike to deploy and use WireGuard in diverse environments. The simplicity also means that there are less likely to be configuration errors, and it is easier for security experts to audit WireGuard implementations. From a performance perspective, WireGuard offers high speeds on a wide variety of devices and architectures.

Why ProtonMail supports the WireGuard project

For all the reasons above, we plan to eventually add WireGuard support in ProtonVPN. Moreover, as active members of the open-source community ourselves, we appreciate and believe strongly in projects that expand free, public access to strong encryption. For example, ProtonMail’s code is open source, and we are also the maintainer of OpenPGPjs, an open-source encryption library used in hundreds of applications. We know how important it is to ensure open-source projects have the support they need to thrive, and that’s why we would like to support WireGuard.

ProtonMail Lifetime Account auction

WireGuard is still in active development and relies solely on donations. You can support WireGuard by placing a bid on one of our ProtonMail Lifetime Account auctions. A Lifetime Account is our most exclusive account, giving users access to premium features on all current and future Proton services. All of the funds we raise will be donated to WireGuard, along with an additional donation from us so that at least €10,000 is raised.

You can learn more about the charity auctions and ProtonMail Lifetime Accounts here.

You can also support WireGuard without bidding on a Lifetime account by visiting this page.

Thanks to the support from the Proton community, WireGuard developers can continue to devote themselves to improving the state of the art in secure tunnelling.

Best Regards,

The ProtonMail Team

This year, we are also supporting Charter’97 (read their story on our blog here) and the Reporters Without Borders Berlin Scholarship (read their story on our blog here).

P.S. If your organization is part of the Proton community and in need of support, please let us know at media@protonmail.ch as we plan to hold additional campaigns in the future.

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