Lion Cipher Lab
Build a WireGuard VPN between two machines you own
- Cyber / Security Engineer
- Beginner
- ~30 min
- Free · no account required
Why it matters
A VPN is one of the most misunderstood tools in security: people reach for one expecting invisibility and get, instead, an encrypted tunnel between two endpoints. Building one by hand fixes that. WireGuard is the modern standard — small, fast, and simple enough that you can read the whole configuration and understand every line, which is exactly why it makes a good teacher. Doing this teaches the ideas that transfer everywhere: public and private keys, how identity is bound to an IP, and how to prove a connection is actually encrypted rather than just hoping it is. That's the mental model…
What you'll learn
- VPNs
- WireGuard
- public/private keypairs
- encrypted tunnels
- reading a peer config (AllowedIPs, Endpoint)
- verifying a handshake
Steps in this lab
- What a VPN really is — and what it is not
- Install WireGuard on both machines
- Generate a keypair on each machine
- Understand the config: AllowedIPs and Endpoint
- Write the tunnel config on each machine
- Bring the interface up
- Confirm the encrypted tunnel
- What you built, and where it stops