I understand the point but this comes across as immature. OpenSSL has provided years of free software, supporting thousands of sites and applications. Of course it has its problems, and there is nothing wrong with adding more competition in this space. But what this space needs now, more than ever, is professionalism and pride in craft (by which I mean demonstrable unit test coverage, regression testing, fuzz testing…
They've already done massive amounts of work already - adding missing checks, documenting a metric ton of magic numbers, removing VMS support, fixing year 2038 bugs, removing insecure cypher support, removing less secure replacements for secure OS inbuilts, unused code, and more, see http://opensslrampage.org . On a side note, I was really hoping for the name to be OpenTLS (consistent with OpenBSD and OpenSSH, which…
LibreSSL
111–120 of 262 posts
Re: LibreSSL
#112Comic sans?? lol! This page scientifically designed to annoy web hipsters. Donate now to stop the Comic Sans and Blink Tags
Ah yes, the kind of professionalism I've come to expect from OpenBSD. They make decent software, but boy could they use some work in the PR department.
Re: LibreSSL
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
StartCom/StartSSL [1] and, to my knowledge, Comodo [2] do offer free (and widely supported) SSL certs. Charges may apply to revoke certificates if a private key is leaked ($25 at StartSSL, IIRC). As for why SSL should be used everywhere: It improves security and makes eavesdropping more expensive. For the first point, see the BEAST and CRIME attacks. On vulnerable systems, a single unencrypted connection may be used…
I bet StartSSL would happily (and publicly) waive any revoke fees to FOSS SSL software projects.
Re: LibreSSL
#114~B
Re: LibreSSL
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite frankly unless LibreSSL manages to raise more than 2000$ a year (what the OpenSSL fundation makes, apparently) I fail to see how they hope to avoid encountering the same kind of problems OpenSSL did (and still does). And given that the OpenBSD projects had to beg for donations to reach a 150k$ goal, if memory serves, I doubt they'll be able to sink a tremendous amount of money into LibreSSL. If you can't pay pe…
openbsd has a tremendously good track record with writing secure software, though. OpenSSH, anyone?
That being said it's a program with mostly well defined use cases while OpenSSL is a library used in thousands of programs (including OpenSSH) on a variety of hardware and operating systems. The OpenBSD project naturally mostly cares about OpenBSD first and the rest second, which might be a bad thing if we end up with a multitude of forks each supporting a particular OS/architecture, increasing the chances of messing things up. After all, the latest big OpenSSH vulnerability was due to debian-specific patches...
Also, for what it's worth, sloccount tells me the latest snapshot of OpenSSH has about 90 thousand lines of code while OpenSSL has more than 360 thousand. It's a huge, huge library, forking and maintaining it is a tremendous undertaking, even compared to OpenSSH.
Re: LibreSSL
#116I understand the point but this comes across as immature. OpenSSL has provided years of free software, supporting thousands of sites and applications. Of course it has its problems, and there is nothing wrong with adding more competition in this space. But what this space needs now, more than ever, is professionalism and pride in craft (by which I mean demonstrable unit test coverage, regression testing, fuzz testing…
I still can't believe such a fundamental backbone of the web runs on $2000/year. This is a -worldwide- service, and it runs on peanuts. It's flabbergasting. Please donate today if you can. https://www.openssl.org/support/donations.html
Re: LibreSSL
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
StartCom/StartSSL [1] and, to my knowledge, Comodo [2] do offer free (and widely supported) SSL certs. Charges may apply to revoke certificates if a private key is leaked ($25 at StartSSL, IIRC). As for why SSL should be used everywhere: It improves security and makes eavesdropping more expensive. For the first point, see the BEAST and CRIME attacks. On vulnerable systems, a single unencrypted connection may be used…
If you have to pay for revocation, then it is not free certificate. It is just certificate with fees postponed. It is not the same thing. Not sure how you, but when I buy things I do not consider only initial price, but also additional fees. If we want SSL used everywhere, browsers need accept self signed certificates in less obtuse way or there need to be other way to get really free ones.
Re: LibreSSL
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the fact remains that OpenSSL is very widely used on Windows and yanking it out without providing a drop-in replacement option is a bad idea The LibreSSL guys are not yanking anything out of Windows, they're just providing an alternative to OpenSSL, for all the world to use, for free . They're not under any obligation to support Windows, no matter how bad you want them to.
I don't expect them to support Windows, you misunderstand the whole concern. The concern is that OpenBSD fellas are fragmenting the project and they are also asserting that OpenSSL team was doing things wrong for a long time. This is not a start of a beautiful friendship. Throw in a bit of crowd lynching (to the tune of "OpenBSD is showing OpenSSL how to do security right") and we can end up with OpenSSL devs showing…
Re: LibreSSL
#119After heartbleed everybody blamed OpenSSL's bloated code base and it became apparent that many contributions came from volunteers with very few financing.
By forking the project, LibreSSL will keep the problematic code legacy and split the community. Maybe I am missing something, but it looks like opportunism here...
Re: LibreSSL
#120Comic sans?? lol! This page scientifically designed to annoy web hipsters. Donate now to stop the Comic Sans and Blink Tags
Ah yes, the kind of professionalism I've come to expect from OpenBSD. They make decent software, but boy could they use some work in the PR department.