ExpressVPN Upgrades Its Lightway Security Protocol

ExpressVPN Upgrades Its Lightway Security Protocol

Time Stamp: October 3, 2023 10:09 AM

Tyler Cross Tyler Cross
Published on: October 3, 2023 ExpressVPN Upgrades Its Lightway Security Protocol

ExpressVPN, the industry-leading VPN company, has upgraded its in-house Lightway security protocol.

Every VPN uses a security protocol, with popular protocols including OpenVPN and WireGuard, but ExpressVPN’s in-house protocol stands out as one of the fastest and safest protocols. Now, it’s being upgraded from DTLS 1.2 to DTLS 1.3, bringing new features as well.

“The upgrade to DTLS 1.3 in Lightway brings significant benefits to our users and anyone making use of Lightway,” ExpressVPN said in a recent blog post.

DTLS 1.3 is built on the latest version of the Datagram Transport Layer Security protocol — the company is the first to use this new protocol. Currently, most protocols struggle to meet the speed and security that the DTLS 1.2 Lightway build provides.

The new upgrade improves on four major aspects of ExpressVPN.

It improves ExpressVPN’s performance by reducing latency and improving its performance at the same time.

“DTLS 1.3 brings significant improvements to data transfer efficiency, resulting in faster download and upload speeds, and an overall more reliable online experience,” ExpressVPN posted.

It also increases ExpressVPN’s security with more powerful cryptographic algorithms and authentication.

“DTLS 1.3 introduces native and lightweight support for rekeying a connection, ensuring that even if an attacker gains access to a session key, previously sent or received data remains encrypted, secure, and out of reach,” ExpressVPN said.

While DTLS 1.2 includes a similar feature, rekeying is safer and faster, which bolsters privacy protection, according to ExpressVPN. It also reduces the company’s overhead, which lowers bandwidth consumption and less data consumption. Lastly, the VPN said DTLS 1.3 lays a strong foundation for post-quantum cryptographic protocol support in Lightway by introducing support for adding new cryptographic algorithms.

Put plainly, the company is building its infrastructure with the future in mind. ExpressVPN’s new features are available for free in its most recent security update.

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