WireGuard
A modern VPN protocol, around 4,000 lines of code, designed to be small enough to audit properly.
Glossary
AES-256
A symmetric encryption cipher with a 256-bit key, standard in OpenVPN and IKEv2 configurations.
Why it matters
It is the number every VPN advertises, usually as "military-grade encryption".
What most explanations leave out
The cipher is not where consumer VPNs differ. All of them use something adequate, and none of them is broken at the cipher level. WireGuard does not use AES at all — it uses ChaCha20, which is not weaker, just different. Marketing that leads with the cipher is drawing attention away from the parts that do differ, like logging and jurisdiction.
Related terms
Perfect forward secrecy
Generating a new session key for each connection, so a future key compromise cannot decrypt past recorded traffic.
Terms are defined here because they appear in our scoring rubric or in provider reviews, not to fill a glossary.