Configuring WireGuard with wg-portal

Instrument Panel

Additional Manual Work

Even if wg-portal does some of the work for you, such as managing the interfaces and the automatic or self-service-oriented user administration for your WireGuard VPN, you still have some work to do; for example, wg-portal does not configure the firewall, although it is important to isolate users on different subnets or only allow selected users to access certain network resources.

In smaller setups, where you might want to hide users automatically behind network address translation (NAT), you can implement these rules with Bash commands in what are known as "interface hooks." These hooks can be configured for each individual connection; they are not executed server-side, but on the clients, and you will always have to configure and maintain complex networks as a background task.

Conclusions

WireGuard is gaining ground as a VPN environment. For professional use in the corporate environment, you will probably still miss the kind of toolkit that takes most of the work off your hands. The wg-portal project steps in with support for setting up and managing WireGuard, and it offers self-service for users, as well, which is an easy way to scale irrespective of the number of users.

Infos

WireGuard Portal: https://wgportal.org/latest/
wg-portal Docker image:https://hub.docker.com/r/wgportal/wg-portal

The Author

Dr. Matthias Wübbeling is an IT security enthusiast, scientist, author, consultant, and speaker. As a Lecturer at the University of Bonn in Germany and Researcher at Fraunhofer FKIE, he works on projects in network security, IT security awareness, and protection against account takeover and identity theft. He is the CEO of the university spin-off Identeco, which keeps a leaked identity database to protect employee and customer accounts against identity fraud. As a practitioner, he supports the German Informatics Society (GI), administrating computer systems and service back ends. He has published more than 100 articles on IT security and administration.

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