ExpressVPN Opens Up Its Lightway VPN Protocol

Last year major VPN provider ExpressVPN announced "Lightway" as their new virtual private network protocol designed for speed, stability, and reliability. ExpressVPN announced today they are now making the protocol open-source.

Lightway was engineered by ExpressVPN to provide very fast connection/setup times, privacy and security at the forefront of their design decisions, and other modern amenities for their customers. The decade old VPN provider has now decided to make Lightway open-source under the GNU GPLv2 license.

The Lightway core code-base is now open-source and ExpressVPN will begin accepting contributions from the community too -- including a bug bounty program. In the process of making it open-source, ExpressVPN also had a third-party security audit of the code carried out by security firm Cure53.

Those interested in the Lightway open-sourcing effort can find out more via the ExpressVPN blog. The Lightway code is hosted on GitHub. For those looking at contributing, there is a CLA involved. The code does work across Windows, Linux, Android, macOS / iOS, etc, but does depend upon the Early or Ceedling build systems.

We'll see if there ends up being much community or industry interest around Lightway considering the open-source support already around WireGuard for secure VPN tunnel needs and long being open-source and cross-platform.