20 years ago, on the 23rd December 1998, the first version of OpenSSL was released. OpenSSL was not the original name planned for the project but it was changed over just a few hours before the site went live. Let’s take a look at some of the early history of OpenSSL as some of the background has not been documented before. Back in the late 1990’s, Eric Young and Tim Hudson were well known for the

The OpenSSL Management Committee has been looking at the versioning scheme that is currently in use. Over the years we’ve received plenty of feedback about the “uniqueness” of this scheme, and it does cause some confusion for some users. We would like to adopt a more typical version numbering approach. The current versioning scheme has this format: MAJOR.MINOR.FIX[PATCH] The new scheme will have t

Note: This is an outdated version of this blog post. This information is now maintained in a wiki page. See here for the latest version. The forthcoming OpenSSL 1.1.1 release will include support for TLSv1.3. The new release will be binary and API compatible with OpenSSL 1.1.0. In theory, if your application supports OpenSSL 1.1.0, then all you need to do to upgrade is to drop in the new version o

This is another in the series of posts about decisions we made at our face-to-face meeting a couple of weeks ago. We updated the project roadmap. I think the most important news here, is that our next release will include TLS 1.3. Our current plan is that this will be 1.1.1, which means that it is API-compatible with the current 1.1.0 release. This is really only possible because of the work we di

Today, Karthik Bhargavan and Gaetan Leurent from Inria have unveiled a new attack on Triple-DES, SWEET32, Birthday attacks on 64-bit block ciphers in TLS and OpenVPN. It has been assigned CVE-2016-2183. This post gives a bit of background and describes what OpenSSL is doing. For more details, see their website. Because DES (and triple-DES) has only a 64-bit block size, birthday attacks are a real

The major changes and known issues for the 1.1.0 branch of the OpenSSL toolkit are summarised below. The contents reflect the current state of the NEWS file inside the git repository. More details can be found in the ChangeLog. Major changes between OpenSSL 1.1.0k and OpenSSL 1.1.0l [10 Sep 2019] Fixed a padding oracle in PKCS7_dataDecode and CMS_decrypt_set1_pkey (CVE-2019-1563)For built-in EC cu