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Course Module 03: WireGuard from First Principles
From cryptographic primitives to a working tunnel in production. Key generation, peer configuration, route table behavior, MTU tuning, persistent keepalive, and why WireGuard is the simplest production tunnel that actually works.
This is module 03 of the RouteHarden Network Engineering Course. WireGuard is the default transport for nearly every self-hosted privacy stack built in the last five years. Its surface area is small, its threat model is sharp, and its implementation in Linux ships in the kernel. There is almost no reason to deploy OpenVPN or IPsec for a new project unless you have a specific legacy requirement.
By the end of this module you will:
- Understand the cryptographic primitives WireGuard uses and why each one is there
- Build a working two-peer tunnel from scratch, end-to-end
- Configure routes, MTU, and persistent keepalive correctly for the common topologies
- Diagnose the three or four failure modes you will hit in production
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Network architecture review, self-hosted privacy stacks, zero-trust corporate VPNs.
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