Rosenpass is a daemon, that, given a private key and a list of peers, performs a key exchange with each peer. The resulting keys are given to WireGuard using its PSK feature – WireGuard remains as secure as it was, Rosenpass adds protection against quantum computers. Rosenpass can also write the keys to files; this can be used to integrate Rosenpass with tools other than WireGuard.

The rp bash program is used to build a VPN with WireGuard and Rosenpass. You can inspect how the tool integrates the wg WireGuard frontend and the rosenpass tool that implements our cryptography using the explain flag.

$ rp explain genkey mykey
#! /bin/bash
set -e
umask 077
mkdir -p mykey
wg genkey > mykey/wgsk
rosenpass keygen \
  private-key mykey/pqsk \
  public-key  mykey/pqpk

Since Rosenpass was released very recently, packaging is an ongoing process. We will provide packages for debian, nix, arch linux, and possibly alpine. You can follow the process in the README.

  (arch AUR) $ aura -A rosenpass-git
 (nix-flake) $ nix profile install github:rosenpass/rosenpass#rosenpass
     (cargo) $ cargo install rosenpass

To get more information about command line parameters used by the tools, you can ask the tools for help:

rp help
rosenpass help

To create a VPN connection, start by generating secret keys on both hosts.

rp genkey server.rosenpass-secret
rp genkey client.rosenpass-secret

Extract the public keys:

rp pubkey server.rosenpass-secret server.rosenpass-public
rp pubkey client.rosenpass-secret client.rosenpass-public

Copy the -public directories to the other peers and then start the VPN. On the server:

sudo rp exchange server.rosenpass-secret dev rosenpass0 listen 192.168.0.1:9999 \
	peer client.rosenpass-public allowed-ips fe80::/64

On the client:

sudo rp exchange client.rosenpass-secret dev rosenpass0 \
	peer server.rosenpass-public endpoint 192.168.0.1:9999 allowed-ips fe80::/64

Assign IP addresses:

sudo ip a add fe80::1/64 dev rosenpass0 # Server
sudo ip a add fe80::2/64 dev rosenpass0 # Client

Test the connection by pinging the server on the client machine:

ping fe80::1%rosenpass0 # Client

You can watch how Rosenpass replaces the WireGuard PSK with the following command:

watch -n 0.2 'wg show all; wg show all preshared-keys'