OpenSSL 4.1.0

139 pointsposted 4 hours ago
by petecooper
(github.com)

38 Comments

hannob

3 hours ago

I don't see "we fixed some of the the excessive performance regressions that we introduced in 3.0". Unfortunate...

Context: https://cryptography.io/en/latest/statements/state-of-openss...

chemodax

an hour ago

AWS-Lc looks very promising replacement for OpenSSL these days.

Bender

33 minutes ago

I looked into this and was tempted as there is less read locking and better RNG performance but they stripped the SSL_get1_curves() API which I depend on for bot detection plus I would have to recompile nginx and all its modules everywhere so in the end it was not tempting enough for me. Perhaps I am just lazier in my older age.

mrweasel

2 minutes ago

We ran a number of tests, including sending a percentage of real traffic to endpoints running AWS-LC and Wolfssl. Technically yes, OpenSSL 3.X is slow, measurably so, but not enough that we wanted to deal with it. That's for our use case, I can easily imagine there being others, where maybe you have different hardware or way more traffic, where it would be worth while. For basic TLS termination in haproxy, it wasn't really worth it to us.

ahartmetz

2 hours ago

>We do not fully understand the motivations that led to the public APIs and internal complexity we’ve described here. We’ve done our best to reverse engineer them by asking “what would motivate someone to do this” and often we’ve found ourselves coming up short.

Surely they thought of it but didn't say it out loud... to keep it exploitable, maybe?

woodruffw

33 minutes ago

No, that's not what's being implied. They're just saying they don't understand why OpenSSL has added so many indirections to otherwise straightforward operations.

Source: I am friends with the maintainers who wrote this and was one of the people who reviewed it in draft form.

pseudosaid

15 minutes ago

yet you too dont have an idea why asinine decisions were championed

woodruffw

12 minutes ago

I have a pretty good idea. And it has nothing to do with malice or exploitability.

owenthejumper

an hour ago

I think it's too little too late, people have started moving on https://www.haproxy.com/blog/state-of-ssl-stacks

ashkankiani

42 minutes ago

tangential, but I've always wondered what the point of these random pictures of a lock, gears, or unrelated little voxel art are for? Pre-LLMs, they were often hit or miss in terms of how much they added depending on if they were a random stock image or something someone drew.

But now, with LLMs, they're more available to customize, and it seems like people aren't actually thinking anymore about why they should be there. I think I'm implicitly biasing against the rest of the content in articles which have them as a result, since it's probably a sign of some level of lack of care/thought.

computer23

18 minutes ago

You need an image for the thumbnail that's essentially required for most blog templates and in social media.

haunter

3 hours ago

> Dropped Windows-on-Itanium (VC-WIN64I) and Windows CE (VC-CE) targets from Configurations.

What a throwback. afaik Windows Server 2008 R2 had Itanium updates until 2020 and paid support until this year. Pretty good run to say at least

nirui

2 hours ago

I kinda wonder what if Microsoft (or any major software company) would give their engineers a few decades of time just to refactor their existing systems, opposite of piling on new features. Will it result a much cleaner code, better architect, and stable product?

The last Windows I daily use was Windows 7 Home (same era with Windows Server 2008). The newer ones don't really improved much featurely from my (user) point of view, and from what I've heard, it's getting more sloppyer every newer version.

zbentley

2 hours ago

> what if Microsoft would give their engineers a few decades of time just to refactor their existing systems

They wouldn't, even if they didn't care about shipping new features. The technical complexity inside Windows/Office/old core MS offerings arises only in small part from ordinary tech debt--that is, things fixable without changing observable behavior. The lion's share of that complexity is because of Microsoft's priority to avoid breaking compatibility (backwards, or with hardware/software combos that work) at all costs.

That means that a refactor-only decade would achieve little unless that compatibility priority were changed.

masfuerte

14 minutes ago

The Windows user-mode innards have been significantly refactored. Many of the core system DLLs that apps link to are just redirects to the actual implementation now. Much of the jank seems to be in the UI.

CodesInChaos

an hour ago

It's just as likely it would end up as an overengineered mess. And that's without considering backwards compatibility constraints, which are one of the biggest maintenance burdens.

egorfine

an hour ago

This will NOT please the shareholders. And that's all that matters.

mrweasel

3 hours ago

Make you wonder what they've been testing this on. Even NetBSD doesn't have a recent release for Itanium. Crazy that you can run NetBSD 11.0 on HPPA, but not Itanium, given that HPPA is in some sense the pre-cursor to Itanium.

mixdup

an hour ago

Age is probably less relevant than current installed base/active users

mondainx

3 hours ago

More than likely in "government"; they are always behind and keeping legacy stuff around. I found Windows 1.0 floppies in a drawer, back-in-the-day.

p_l

3 hours ago

Honestly more HPPA gear to test against than Itanium

mlhpdx

24 minutes ago

> Support for DTLS 1.3 (RFC 9147). Refer to the ossl-guide-dtlsv13(7) manual page for details.

DTLS 1.3 is a huge improvement over 1.2 for efficiency and simplicity. I can’t speak to the OpenSSL implementation but it’s great that support is finally released.

adzm

an hour ago

I think this is the only software project I use that still requires me to have perl

markasoftware

38 minutes ago

Interesting they're adding new support for DTLS 1.3 when afaict most new applications are defaulting to QUIC datagram mode. I have something built around DTLS 1.3 and am using wolfssl for that reason, will have to check this out.

mlhpdx

19 minutes ago

QUIC for embedded? I haven’t seen that, but there is a lot of DTLS. Particularly with 1.3, it makes QUIC look like a behemoth in code.

aftbit

an hour ago

Wait, OpenSSL didn't support GREASE until now? The RFC standard landed 6 years ago...

I've been linking a lot of stuff against boringssl during that time, I suppose...

ksec

an hour ago

I wonder what is the current marketshare of Libressl and OpenSSL ?

Razengan

3 hours ago

> Dropped Windows-on-Itanium

A sad day. End of an era *salute*

madduci

an hour ago

Microsoft pulled the plug earlier

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7

2 hours ago

seems like a versioning-induced death

i think a project like this would slough old architecture like mad and let major versions tick, but they forge on...

literalAardvark

2 hours ago

MS ended paid extended support for Itanium, so it's kind of a dead target

amelius

2 hours ago

Was it verified by AI?

(Not a strange question given the recent PHP vulns found by AI.)