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OpenSSL is written by monkeys (2009)

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Re: OpenSSL is written by monkeys (2009)

#131

Post by arg01 »

cortesoft wrote: post #112
arg01 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he is saying by removing trusted root certificates he will trade the possibility of receiving a fraudulent certificate the first time he uses a site for the possibility of not being warned if a certificate changes because the trusted roots are compromised. If he needs to worry about state actors there is an argument to be made for this trade-off, but really if he was worried about that he would be delivering ce…

Yes, verifying certs out-of-band is most likely more secure than a CA. I was not counting that in the self-signed cert vs CA signed cert comparison, since that is not what most people mean when they talk about a self-signed cert.

You ignored my first point. You can trust the self signed certificate to be used by the same entity(A or C) after the first connection, admittedly you may have been MITM (by C) for that first time(and renewal times) and because of that you may be screwed. Alternatively if you are trusting other entities(B) to verify the certificate of A while B are not trustworthy then after that first communication (even if that first communication was legitimate) another entity (C) can pretend to be A and so long as B verifies C then you are in trouble. I am pointing out that they are different risks and I agree that in nearly all use cases it is better to use verified certificates than self-signed for general internet use, that doesn't mean that there isn't a reason to do otherwise though.

Re: OpenSSL is written by monkeys (2009)

#132

Post by userbinator »

agwa wrote: post #19

I've done quite a bit of programming with the OpenSSL library and this article is only scratching the surface of the awfulness. Documentation is horrible to non-existent, you really do need to go spelunking into the source to figure out how things work, and the code really is that horrible. The worst thing is that error reporting is not consistent - sometimes -1 means error, other times 0 means error, other times 0 m…

> you really do need to go spelunking into the source to figure out how things work

What are the chances that this is how a lot of the vulnerabilities were discovered (including heartbleed)? The more people forced to look through the source, the better? (That is, unless they keep that discovery to themselves.)

Edit: maybe they've improved it since the article was written; around 2 years ago I wrote an SSL MITM'ing HTTP(S) proxy, complete with CA certificate generation + signing, in a little over 24h of work.

Re: OpenSSL is written by monkeys (2009)

#133

Post by icebraining »

arg01 wrote: post #106
cortesoft wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make any sense.... even if you don't trust a CA at all, it is impossible for a self-signed cert to be MORE trustworthy, since it provides absolutely ZERO authentication. It could be created by anyone at all, including on the fly by a MITM.

Maybe he is saying by removing trusted root certificates he will trade the possibility of receiving a fraudulent certificate the first time he uses a site for the possibility of not being warned if a certificate changes because the trusted roots are compromised. If he needs to worry about state actors there is an argument to be made for this trade-off, but really if he was worried about that he would be delivering ce…

There are extensions to warn you about certificate changes even if the new is signed by a CA, so that's a terrible reason.

Re: OpenSSL is written by monkeys (2009)

#134

Post by vl »

>OpenSSL is equivalent to monkeys throwing feces at the wall. It is, bar none, the worst library I have ever worked with

Ah, he haven't worked with MS Crypto APIs.

I was implementing TLS/SSL in one of the services working at MS. I couldn't figure out many things from MSDN and samples - they would not cover error and some variations code paths, and there was just no way to figure it out. And recovery would be something like "in third buffer there will be value x, you have to it pass to other function". And there was a need to do it correctly for obvious reasons, really. So finally I got IIS sources to see how it's done correctly, and discovered couple thousand lines of code with comments like this "xxx told us that buffer X will contain value bla if condition Z is met, and this is why we are doing it here". I had no choice but to cut-n-paste it to my service. I can tell you for sure, nobody outside MS can implement TLS/SSL correctly by using MS Crypto APIs. At least with OpenSSL you can read sources for both library and services and figure it out.

Re: OpenSSL is written by monkeys (2009)

#135

Post by TwoBit »

vl wrote: post #134

>OpenSSL is equivalent to monkeys throwing feces at the wall. It is, bar none, the worst library I have ever worked with Ah, he haven't worked with MS Crypto APIs. I was implementing TLS/SSL in one of the services working at MS . I couldn't figure out many things from MSDN and samples - they would not cover error and some variations code paths, and there was just no way to figure it out. And recovery would be somethi…

The absolute worst API in the history of computers is the Microsoft Text Services Framework (TSF) API.

It's incomprehensible, nearly undocumented, 10x more complicated than necessary, and even Microsoft doesn't understand how it works and hates it.

Re: OpenSSL is written by monkeys (2009)

#136

Post by TwoBit »

cpeterso wrote: post #90

Adobe's Flash Player used OpenSSL on Linux for a long time, but eventually switched to NSS because the OpenSSL project would repeatedly break their library ABI without changing version numbers. The OpenSSL developers said that a stable ABI was a non-goal of theirs. (Disclosure: I was an engineer on Adobe's Flash Player team.)

OpenSSL's thread safety policies is undocumented and unintelligible. We gave up and just put a single mutex around any call to OpenSSL within the process.

Re: OpenSSL is written by monkeys (2009)

#137

Post by nhaehnle »

tptacek wrote: post #89
nhaehnle wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of missing the point though. It would be relatively easy to define an interface that is simple to use and allows implementing 90% of the use cases with rather low danger of shooting yourself in the foot. We know that this is possible because there are libraries out there that do it. This whole thread is about OpenSSL somehow failing to do that, despite being called out on it for years.

I don't understand. What part of TLS are you calling "simple"?

The interface between an application that wants to communicate using TLS and perform related tasks and a library that implements TLS can and should be simple - at least for the 90% of common use cases.

The whole point of the original article is that the interface of OpenSSL is horrible and undocumented. Consider how the article's author was not originally interested in looking at the internals of OpenSSL. All they wanted was a decent and documented interface for dealing with certificates; if OpenSSL had exposed such an interface, they would never even have looked at the source code of its internals.

Re: OpenSSL is written by monkeys (2009)

#139

Post by [deleted] »

TwoBit wrote: post #135
vl wrote: post #134

>OpenSSL is equivalent to monkeys throwing feces at the wall. It is, bar none, the worst library I have ever worked with Ah, he haven't worked with MS Crypto APIs. I was implementing TLS/SSL in one of the services working at MS . I couldn't figure out many things from MSDN and samples - they would not cover error and some variations code paths, and there was just no way to figure it out. And recovery would be somethi…

The absolute worst API in the history of computers is the Microsoft Text Services Framework (TSF) API. It's incomprehensible, nearly undocumented, 10x more complicated than necessary, and even Microsoft doesn't understand how it works and hates it.

[deleted]

Re: OpenSSL is written by monkeys (2009)

#140

Post by hrrsn »

sorbits wrote: post #105
mrtksn wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

O.K. This is probably a stupid question but if it was apparent to many that the code of OpenSSL was horrible why people kept using it and nobody tried to re-factor it? How it is possible that such a popular and critical piece of opensource software survived the years without a complete face-lift and nobody wrote thorogh documentation?

Apple has deprecated OpenSSL as of Mac OS X 10.7 and they are not including it with iOS. Instead they provide their own APis. The semi-official reason though is that OpenSSL doesn’t offer API compatibility between versions.

OS X 10.9.2 still ships with OpenSSL. Luckily it's 0.9.8 and immune to the heartbeat bug.
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