OpenSSL STATUS Last modified at ______________ $Date: 1999/01/30 17:34:59 $ DEVELOPMENT STATE o OpenSSL 0.9.2: Under development. o OpenSSL 0.9.1c: Released on December 23th, 1998 RELEASE SHOWSTOPPERS AVAILABLE PATCHES IN PROGRESS o Steve is currently working on: X509 V3 extension code including: 1. Support for the more common PKIX extensions. 2. Proper (or at least usable) certificate chain verification. 3. Support in standard applications (req, x509, ca). 4. Documentation on how all the above works. Next on the list is probably PKCS#12 integration. NEEDS PATCH OPEN ISSUES o The Makefile hierarchy and build mechanism is still not a round thing: 1. The config vs. Configure scripts It's the same nasty situation as for Apache with APACI vs. src/Configure. It confuses. Suggestion: Merge Configure and config into a single configure script with a Autoconf style interface ;-) and remove Configure and config. Or even let us use GNU Autoconf itself. Then we can avoid a lot of those platform checks which are currently in Configure. 2. The xxx.org -> xxx.h generation: It's not obvious for which file xxx.org is the source. Suggestion: Rename xxx.org to xxx.h.in (Autoconf style), this way one sees that xxx.h.in is the input for xxx.h o The installation under "make install" produces a very installation layout: $prefix/certs and $prefix/private dirs. That's not nice. Ralf suggests to move the two certs and private dirs either to $prefix/etc/, $prefix/lib/ or $prefix/share. Alternatively we could also not install the certs at all. Status: Ralf +1 for both not installing the certs at all and moving it to $prefix/etc/. +0 for $prefix/lib/ and $prefix/share. Paul: why is it not nice? Ralf: because it messes up the install dir when $prefix is not a dedicated area like /usr/local/ssl. When we move them to a standard subdir like etc/ lib/ or share/ we don't mess up things when $prefix is /usr or /usr/local, etc. Additionally it makes package vendors life easier.... o Support for Shared Libraries has to be added at least for the major Unix platforms. The details we can rip from the stuff Ralf has done for the Apache src/Configure script. Ben wants the solution to be really simple. Status: Ralf will look how we can easily incorporate the compiler PIC and linker DSO flags from Apache into the OpenSSL Configure script. o The perl/ stuff needs a major overhaul. Currently it's totally obsolete. Either we clean it up and enhance it to be up-to-date with the C code or we also could replace it with the really nice Net::SSLeay package we can find under http://www.neuronio.pt/SSLeay.pm.html. Ralf uses this package for a longer time and it works fine and is a nice Perl module. Best would be to convince the author to work for the OpenSSL project and create a Net::OpenSSL or Crypt::OpenSSL package out of it and maintains it for us. Status: Ralf thinks we should both contact the author of Net::SSLeay and look how much effort it is to bring Eric's perl/ stuff up to date. Paul +1 o The EVP and ASN1 stuff is a mess. Currently you have one EVP_CIPHER structure for each cipher. This may make sense for things like DES but for variable length ciphers like RC2 and RC4 it is NBG. Need a way to use the EVP interface and set up the cipher parameters. The ASN1 stuff is also foo wrt ciphers whose AlgorithmIdentifier has more than just an IV in it (e.g. RC2, RC5). This also means that EVP_Seal and EVP_Open don't work unless the key length matches the fixed value (some vendors use a key length decided by the size of the RSA encrypted key and expect RC2 to adapt). WISHES o Damien Miller: "How about making the each of the locations compile-time defined. I would like to (for example) put binaries in /usr/bin, configuration data, certs and keys in /etc/openssl/certs and /etc/openssl/keys, etc. This would also be a great boon to binary package makers. The SSLeay-0.9.1b RPM already includes some patches which do some of this. I can forward them if you wish."