Android 12 May Feature Built-In VPN to Make Working From Home More Secure

With work from home becoming the new normal, the demand for a secure VPN has shot up, with more people trying to connect to their company’s servers remotely. This demand gave birth to WireGuard – a next-gen VPN protocol that uses state-of-the-art cryptography standards to provide users the highest level of privacy, security, and speed, while connecting users to a remote network. Now, Google has added support for WireGuard to Android 12’s Linux Kernels, meaning that all Android 12 smartphones will come with built-in VPN, a feature already present on iOS smartphones.

WireGuard is a new VPN protocol and is considered faster than other protocols, despite having substantially less lines of code at 4,000. To compare, another VPN protocol called OpenVPN runs on 100,000 lines of code. Soon after the release, WireGuard was added to the Linux Kernel and made available in Linux 5.6. Since Android is also based on Linux, it makes sense for Google to bring native WireGuard support to Android by adding it to the Android 12 Linux Kernel 5.4 and Kernel 4.19 trees.