ICMC18: OpenSSL Project Overview

OpenSSL Project Overview (S22c) Rich Salz, Senior Architect Akamai Technologies & Member, OpenSSL Dev Team, United States

Covering what's new since last year's update at ICMC17.  Post heartbleed, the project started a recovery effort. LibreSSL forked, and several older releases were EOLed. Started 1.1.0 in 2014 (depending on who you ask), and working on hiding all the structures. Google then started their own fork (BoringSSL). Then the team released 1.1.0!

OpenSSL 1.0.2 is supported through the end of 2019, last year is only security fixes. Extended by a year as the next LTs release wasn't ready. 1.1.1 will be the next LTS release and 1.1.0 will only be supported for 1 year after that. (security fixes only).

Very close to reaching exit criteria for 1.1.1 - want a final beta period after IETF RFC for TLS 1.3 is published (soon!). It's in editorial review, hoping nobody finds a major technical flaw at this point.  1.1.1 should be source and binary compatible with 1.1.0. Focus of the next release is FIPS.

Current CMVP 1747 expires in 2022 and we're not touching the 1747 code anymore. It's not on the historical release. 1747 is based off of OpenSSL 1.0.2, so there will be a gap.

Start porting your applications to the master gate. 1.1.1 has the same API/ABI as 1.1.0 and therefore the big "opaque" changes. FIPS will be moving forward, not backward.  You will interop on TLS 1.3.

Last HIGH CVE was in February 2017, found by fuzzing and it was a crash.  Before that, it was November 2016 (also fuzzing and also a crash). Got a grant from Amazon to create a fuzzing database. Prior CVE was in September 2016 (found by 3rd party, a memory growth leading to probably crash).  We call them CVEs so downstream will know to pick them up.

Everything for OpenSSL is now down on GitHub. It's added features to make it easier to do things. Every pull request is built 7 different ways with different options and various OSes.  Every pull request has to go through this CI process and must have a clean pass.

We have an active global community now - people from Amazon, Facebook, Google, Intel, Oracle, China (Ribose, Baishan), Russia (GOSt ciphers).  It's good to be open source and great open source contributors.

The OMC meets annually face-to-face. Most folks don't believe we can fill 2 days... but always fill the time. With the exception of private finance items and release level stuff, everything is posted to the openssl-project mailing list.  Added video conferencing this year, and remote team members stayed online for the full 8 hours.

Features!

Protocol handling uses a safe API, no more of this: len = (p[0] << 8) | p[1]; read (ssl, buff, len); - Now use safe API which understands TLS protocol! no more open coding of protocol messages.

New infrastructure - native threads support. DRBG-based CSPRNG. ASYNC support, Auto-init and cleanup, uninvited build system, system-wide config files (able to turn off algorithms and specific features), new test framework (no new API w/out a unit test).

New cryptography! X25519, Ed25519, Ed448, Cha-Cha/Poly (DJB & Co), SHA3, SM2/3/4, ARIA, OCB, many old/weak algorithms disabled by default (still in source). New policy: only the EVP layer is supported, and only standardized crypto.

New network support. IPv6 revised and now complete, for example.

Did an external audit and addressed the code quality issues that came up. Getting better at responding to reported issues and bugs. More and better documentation, all things in the main section should be documented. Lots of old code (ifdef options) removed. Will only take new crypto that has been approved by a standard's body.

And.. TLS 1.3. It works, people are using it in production.  It interoperates! It is different, so new issues and configs to think about. We know people are using it... but nobody is complaining (yet). Can't say at this point where the traffic is coming from (customer confidentiality), but it is coming in.

In the 1.1.0 release, there won't be FIPS. See Tim's next session for more details:-)

Still working on changing the license, can't commit to when / which release it might be.

Code is not noticeably smaller, there are ports for embedded device.