Security best practices when exposing WS4W to the Internet

[marcoskull-png]

Hi Micah,
First of all, thank you for the project — WS4W has been extremely helpful.
I wanted to ask for your opinion on recommended security practices when exposing a Windows-based WireGuard server (WS4W) to the Internet.
In your experience, is it sufficient to simply forward UDP port 51820 from the router directly to the Windows machine running WS4W?
Or would you recommend placing an additional firewall in between that can perform traffic filtering or rate limiting, even though WireGuard packets are fully encrypted and can’t be inspected at a deep level?
I’m particularly interested in whether you see any practical security benefits from adding that intermediate firewall layer, or if keeping the setup simple with a single port-forward is the approach you consider safest and most appropriate for WS4W deployments.
Thanks again for your work, and I appreciate any guidance you can share!

[micahmo]

Hey @marcoskull-png, thank you for the kind words!

I have to preface this by saying that I am not a cybersecurity expert; that is a whole field that you could spend a lifetime studying, so take my advice with a grain of salt. 😊

In my opinion, you don't need the extra firewall. I have been running WS4W on several machines for quite a while now and I hardly get a peep of traffic that isn't mine. Maybe hackers have found that the WS4W port rarely provides a useful attack surface (as opposed to other more common ports like 22, 80, etc.). If you wanted to give yourself an even lower chance of being hit by random traffic, use a less common port that's not necessarily associated with any known applications. Note that this doesn't increase your "security", it just lessens the chance that you'll be hit by a crawler.

That said, a firewall with a whitelist or geo-blocking can also be a very useful gatekeeper!