Cloudflare Announces General Availability Of Its WARP VPN For Desktop

Cloudflare WARP desktop

Cloudflare is known as a company working on speeding up and protecting websites, but it has since ventured beyond the web infrastructure business to also appeal end users.

Using its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver which was introduced back in 2018 for example, to then built the resolver's mobile apps months later, to then put a VPN called WARP+ on top of that in 2019.

Fast forward to 2020, as the world experiences the 'COVID-19' coronavirus pandemic, uses of VPN went up drastically.

This is because more people are online from home, and with more people browsing more things during 'office hours'.

Acknowledging the trend, Cloudflare wanted to grab the opportunity by first announcing the 1.1.1.1 WARP VPN for desktop users. At that time, it was launched as a beta.

This time, Cloudflare announced the general availability of the desktop VPN.

Cloudflare’s WARP is a already known as a fast and reliable VPN for users on Android and iOS. The free version which is the basic WARP that comes with 1.1.1.1, is also pretty stable.

WARP+ which costs around $1 a month, will give an even faster speeds and priority service.

After announcing the beta release of WARP VPN for desktop, no words have been announced about the project since that time. But finally after the long wait, in mid-October, Cloudflare is finally bringing the VPN to all users, irrespective of them being a Windows users or a macOS users.

This global availability of the VPN, is part of Cloudflare's push to accelerate the shift toward zero-trust IT environments using a VPN based on a Wireguard protocol that is optimized for data encryption.

And WARP here, is Cloudflare's implementation of the Wireguard-powered VPN into its product.

"Over the last few years, we began building products that could help deliver a faster and safer Internet to everyone, not just visitors to sites on our network. We started with the first step to visiting any website, a DNS query, and released the world’s fastest public DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1. Any Internet user could improve the speed to connect to any website simply by changing their resolver," wrote Cloudflare on its announcement.

"While making the Internet faster for users, we also focused on making it more private. We built 1.1.1.1 to accelerate the last mile of connections, from user to our edge or other destinations on the Internet. Unlike other providers, we did not build it to sell ads."

Read: Cloudflare Finally Turns On The VPN Service For Its 1.1.1.1 DNS Resolver

Cloudflare WARP desktop

By bringing WARP to desktop, Cloudflare simply brings its product to security teams.

Because of this, WARP for desktop needs to appeal businesses that embrace remote work models at scale. This is why Cloudflare also enables WARP in is Cloudflare Gateway product.

What this means, users can use WARP application to connect corporate desktops to Cloudflare Gateway for advanced web filtering. The Gateway features rely on the same performance and security benefits of the underlying WARP technology, now with security filtering available to the connection, explained Cloudflare.

"The result is a simple way for enterprises to protect their users wherever they are without requiring the backhaul of network traffic to a centralized security boundary. Instead, organizations can configure the WARP client application to securely and privately send remote users’ traffic through a Cloudflare data center near them."

And also because it needs to meet corporate requirements, WARP for desktop also have encryption that works on users' device to encrypt traffic before reaching Cloudflare' edge.

Here, Cloudflare uses the BoringTun, which ensures that no one can eavesdrop on what users are doing.

However, there are some known issues.

At this time at least, users may experience that they cannot purchase a subscription via the desktop app. To subscribe to WARP+, they may have to purchase it via the Android or iOS apps, and then copy the key they received after purchasing to the desktop app.

Issues were also reported when multiple separate user accounts want to use the same Cloudflare WARP client.

Then there is no pause feature to temporarily disconnect from WARP, a feature that is already available on WARP on Android and iOS from the very beginning.

There is also some issues on network performance when IPv6 is enabled.

But regardless of the issues, Cloudflare has committed to maintain privacy of its users, saying that it "will never sell your personal data to third parties."

And combined that with Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver, WARP should be able to maintain a private connection that is also fast.

Published: 
06/11/2020