Cloudflare Announces Free VPN Service for Faster, More Private Internet

On the footsteps of the company’s launch of the private DNS service with the 1.1.1.1 IP address, Cloudflare today announced the launch of the free Warp VPN service that it claimed will not only keep your data private, but also make your internet connections faster.

What Is Cloudflare Warp?

Warp is Cloudflare’s first attempt at building a VPN service that anyone, even non-technical people, can use through the company’s 1.1.1.1 mobile application, launched in November, last year.

Warp promises not just an easy-to-use interface free of the clunkiness of most other VPN clients, but also a level of performance and security that the vast majority of VPN services don’t have.

For starters, Warp uses the much more modern Wireguard protocol, not OpenVPN. WireGuard has only 4,000 lines of code, was written in the memory safe Rust programming language (among other implementations) and uses fast and secure modern encryption algorithms. In contrast, OpenVPN combined with OpenSSL has a total of over 600,000 lines of code. That means WireGuard has a much smaller attack surface and is also easier and quicker to audit.

WireGuard is not the only reason why Warp is fast compared to other VPN services. Cloudflare, which offers content network delivery services, DDoS mitigation services and other similar services, is in a good spot to offer fast connectivity to many websites whose content Cloudflare may already be caching near you.

Beyond the Advertising Model

Cloudflare noted that most VPN services that are free also tend to sell your data. Cloudflare promised never to do that. It aims to pay for the free service via its premium “Warp+” subscription plan that users can buy to gain access to an even faster private Cloudflare infrastructure, plus other features. The company said the monthly cost will be low but hasn’t announced it yet.

The Warp VPN service is not yet available for use but should be soon, Cloudflare said. The company announced today in order so the news would land exactly one year after it launched its private DNS service, but it will take a little longer to finish developing it. However, you can sign-up to be notified about Warp’s availability within the 1.1.1.1 mobile app.