ICMC16: OpenSSL Update

Tim Hudson, Cryptsoft

The OpenSSL team had their first face to face meeting, ever! 11 of the 15 members got together digging into documentation and fixing bugs - and POODLE broke, so... they got to know each other quite well.

The team thinks of time as "before" April 2014 and after... Before there were only 2 main developers, entirely on volunteer basis.  Nor formal decision making process, extremely resource limited.  After April 2014, now have 2 full time developers and 5-6 regular developers.  This really helps the project.

After a wake-up call, you have to be more focused on what you should be doing. Everyone is now analyzing your code-base, looking for the next heartbleed.  Now there is more focus on fuzz testing, increased automated testing. Static code analysis tools are rapidly being updated to detect heartbleed and things like heartbleed.

New: mandatory code review for every single changeset.  [wow!]

The OpenSSL team now has a roadmap, and they are reporting updates against them.  They want to make sure they continue to be "cryptography for the real world" and not ignore "annoying" user base for legitimate concerns or feature needs.

Version 1.0.2 will be supported until 2019.  No longer will all releases be supported for essentially eternity.

OpenSSL now changing defaults for applications, larger key sizes. removing platform code for platforms that are long gone from the field.  Adding new algorithms, like ChaCha20 and Poly1305. The entire TLS state machine has been rewritten.  Big change: internal data structures are going to be opaque, which will allow maintainers to make fixes more easily.

FIPS 140 related work paid for OpenSSL development through 2014.  It is hard to go through a validation with one specific vendor, who will have their own agenda. 

There are 244 other modules that reference OpenSSL in their validations, and another 50 that leverage it but do not list it on their boundary.

The OpenSSL FIPS 2.0 module works with OpenSSL-1.0.x. There is no funding or plans for an OpenSSL FIPS module to work with OpenSSL-1.1.x.

The hopes are that the FIPS 3.0 module will be less intrusive.

If you look at all the OpenSSL related validations, you'll see they cover 174 different operating environments.

How can you help? Download the pre-release versions and build your applications. Join the openssl-dev and/or openssl-users mailing lists. report bugs and submit features 

If FIPS is essential to have in the code base, why hasn't anyone stepped forward with funding?