Lightway Reimagined: From C to Rust and Into the Future, Peter Membrey, FOSSASIA Summit 2025

Lightway, ExpressVPN’s cutting-edge VPN protocol, is more than just code - it’s a story of iinnovation, evolution, and collaboration. Since its inception, Lightway has been open source in its C-based form, delivering simplicity and speed to VPN users worldwide. But we knew it could be more. This talk is about that transformation. I’ll take you behind the scenes of our journey from C to Rust - a leap driven by the desire for better security, maintainability, and scalability. Along the way, we tackled challenges, learned hard lessons, and uncovered the true potential of what Lightway could become. Now, with Rust as its foundation, Lightway is set to deliver more than ever: higher-quality implementations of both the server and client, ready for real-world use. And this is just the beginning. We’re excited to invite the open-source community to join us in this next phase, collaborating to make Lightway accessible, impactful, and easy to adopt in distributions everywhere. FOSSASIA Summit 2025, held in Bangkok, is Asia's leading Open Source tech conference featuring sessions on AI, Cloud, DevOps, Open Hardware, Security, Web/Mobile Technologies, Web3, and Databases. Learn more: http://summit.fossasia.org Session slides: https://eventyay.com/e/4c0e0c27/session/9700 #FOSSASIA #FOSSASIASummit #opensource #FOSS #security