| GnuTLS | s2n | |
|---|---|---|
| - | 10 | |
| 3 | 4,487 | |
| - | 0.4% | |
| 0.0 | 9.5 | |
| over 13 years ago | 6 days ago | |
| C | C | |
| GNU General Public License v3.0 only | Apache License 2.0 |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
GnuTLS
We haven't tracked posts mentioning GnuTLS yet.
Tracking mentions began in Dec 2020.
s2n
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OpenSSL bug exposed up to 255 bytes of server heap and existed since 2011
I started writing s2n the day after Heartbleed and the first lines of code were for the stuffer interface. A stuffer is a buffer for stuff, and it's like Java buffered I/O for C. You can get a flavor from reading the header: https://github.com/aws/s2n-tls/blob/main/stuffer/s2n_stuffer...
The implementation is incredibly simple. Treat all blocks of memory as blob with a known size and then read/write into those blobs with a cursor to track progress and bounds checks on every access. Fence all serialization/deserialization through a safe low level interface. Not only do you get memory safety (which we later proved using formal reasoning) ... but when you're parsing message formats it lends itself to a declarative coding style that makes it very clear what the structure is. You can also do lifecycle things, like erasing sensitive memory with zeroes when you're done with it, making sure things don't show up in core dumps, etc. BoringSSL introduced a Crypto_bytes API that also did some of this plus bounds checking, and retrofit it into OpenSSL.
OpenSSL on the other hand is a horrific mash up of raw pointer arithmetic, ad-hoc parsers interleaved with business logic and control flow. I could never keep it straight, and it always scared me to review.
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S2n-TLS – A C99 implementation of the TLS/SSL protocol
It seems to support multiple options but requires you pick at least one of them. https://github.com/aws/s2n-tls/blob/main/docs/BUILD.md#build...
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OpenSSL 1.1.1 End of Life
I think GnuTLS is probably the second most popular TLS library, after openssl.
I'll also mentions s2n and rustls-ffi for completeness as C libraries, though the former isn't widely used, and the latter is very experimental still. https://github.com/aws/s2n-tls and https://github.com/rustls/rustls-ffi respectively.
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I want XAES-256-GCM/11
I've seen operating on unauthenticated plaintext enough times to list it as my own pet peeve with AES-GCM. But it's a problem for chunked messages too. A few years ago we released a SCRAM mode that makes very minimal changes to AES-GCM so that it mathematically can't operate on unauthenticated plaintext. https://github.com/aws/s2n-tls/tree/main/scram
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Golang is evil on shitty networks
> The documentation is kind of vague, but apparently you have to re-enable it regularly.[3]
This is correct. And in the end it means more or less that setting the socket option is more of a way of sending an explicit ACK from userspace than a real setting.
It's not great for common use-cases, because making userspace care about ACKs will obviously degrade efficiency (more syscalls).
However it can make sense for some use-cases. E.g. I saw the s2n TLS library using QUICKACK to avoid the TLS handshake being stuck [1]. Maybe also worthwhile to be set in some specific RPC scenarios where the server might not immediately send a response on receiving the request, and where the client could send additional frames (e.g. gRPC client side streaming, or in pipelined HTTP requests if the server would really process those in parallel and not just let them sit in socket buffers).
[1] https://github.com/aws/s2n-tls/blob/46c47a71e637cabc312ce843...
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S2n-QUIC (Rust implementation of QUIC)
It looks like by default s2n-quic uses this TLS implementation, which is not based on the ring crate (though it is written in C)
https://github.com/aws/s2n-tls
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LibreSSL Languishes on Linux
I would be interested in the other SSL implementations:
- https://github.com/awslabs/s2n
- https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl
- https://bearssl.org/
Are these subpar implementations or there are other reasons not to use these?
What are some alternatives?
OpenSSL - TLS/SSL and crypto library
mbedTLS - An open source, portable, easy to use, readable and flexible TLS library, and reference implementation of the PSA Cryptography API. Releases are on a varying cadence, typically around 3 - 6 months between releases.
LibreSSL - LibreSSL Portable itself. This includes the build scaffold and compatibility layer that builds portable LibreSSL from the OpenBSD source code. Pull requests or patches sent to [email protected] are welcome.
GnuPG - Mirror of git://git.gnupg.org/gnupg.git — master branch contains no changes from upstream.
LibTomCrypt - LibTomCrypt is a fairly comprehensive, modular and portable cryptographic toolkit that provides developers with a vast array of well known published block ciphers, one-way hash functions, chaining modes, pseudo-random number generators, public key cryptography and a plethora of other routines.
libsodium - A modern, portable, easy to use crypto library.
Botan - Cryptography Toolkit
libhydrogen - A lightweight, secure, easy-to-use crypto library suitable for constrained environments.