boringssl VS awesome-appsec

I have nothing constructive to add except that OpenSSL has a long history of producing vulnerabilities so much so that Google has created their own fork publicly available here: https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl/ (used in chromium, chrome, and android).

> Large web companies like Google implement their own encryption stack anyway.

Google uses BoringSSL[1], which is another OpenSSL fork. I believe AWS uses a mix of OpenSSL and Boring SSL (someone can correct me!).

So it's "their own encryption stack," but that stack is at least originally comprised of OpenSSL's code. They've probably done an admirable job of refactoring it, but API and ABI constraints still apply (it's very hard to change the massive body of existing code that assumes OpenSSL's APIs).

[1]: https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl/

OpenSSL gets plenty of funding but we need to put more funding into TLS implementations that have a bigger focus on security and stability like boringssl, nss, go's tls, and rustls. It's 2022 and we have both languages better suited for this and tools to make existing languages safer and more robust, it's incredible to me that we aren't even more anxious over the current state of openssl.

It was not built for chromium AFAIK

To quote: https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl/

BoringSSL arose because Google used OpenSSL for many years in various ways and, over time, built up a large number of patches that were maintained while tracking upstream OpenSSL. As Google's product portfolio became more complex, more copies of OpenSSL sprung up and the effort involved in maintaining all these patches in multiple places was growing steadily.

Currently BoringSSL is the SSL library in Chrome/Chromium, Android (but it's not part of the NDK) and a number of other apps/programs.

Use Google's fork of OpenSSL which exists because Google likes to do it's own weird things sometimes. This doesn't say anything about "OpenSSL is considered dangerous", it says "This allows us to mostly avoid compromises in the name of compatibility. It works for us, but it may not work for you."

And this is why projects like https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl/ exist

The immediate effect of Heartbleed was the OpenBSD folk [1] and Google [2] forking OpenSSL.

There's a talk from Bob Beck of OpenBSD on pruning OpenSSL, it's pretty hilarious [3].

In that case open source was at least able to react appropriately, even if it didn't act preemptively.

[1]: https://www.libressl.org

[2]: https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl/

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnBbhXBDmwU

I doubt the reference to Musk's brand is intentional. It's more likely that it's a reference/homage to BoringSSL (https://github.com/google/boringssl) and "boring tech" in general that is purposefully designed to be minimalist, simple to use, and narrow in scope.

For resources : https://github.com/paragonie/awesome-appsec

AppSec

Here is a repo of some resources. You are going to need to learn to walk before you run so that at a concrete level you can articulate what secure vs insecure code is and why it matters, then dive into appsec. No disrespect intended but from the way this is written my suggestion would be to focus on computer science foundational concepts as well as spending significant time writing and reading code. This will likely be a several year journey if you are a total beginner but the best time to start is now :)

Come over to /r/devsecops to get more information about the field. Also, there are lots of good sources, you can get some from my blog, or Awesome AppSec, or Security Prince and other places.