LibreSSL VS mbedTLS

Compare LibreSSL vs mbedTLS and see what are their differences.

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. (by libressl)

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. (by Mbed-TLS)
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LibreSSL mbedTLS
2 9
1,313 4,898
2.6% 2.2%
9.5 10.0
7 days ago 6 days ago
C C
- GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
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.

LibreSSL

Posts with mentions or reviews of LibreSSL. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-16.

mbedTLS

Posts with mentions or reviews of mbedTLS. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-08-31.
  • OpenWrt 23.05
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Oct 2023
    It's work in progress: https://github.com/Mbed-TLS/mbedtls/blob/development/docs/ar...

    Newer version have okay-ish support, I'd guess the next OpenWRT release will have it again.

  • How can I disable the close_notify message?
    1 project | /r/nginx | 13 Mar 2023
    It's related to this Mbed-TLS issue
  • DIY Physical Backed Tokens (EIP-5791) with ESP32 and BLE
    1 project | /r/ethdev | 2 Feb 2023
    i've used the entropy generator from MbedTLS which uses multiple sources of randomness, and seeding it additionally with the chip's mac address and the free heap size at time of creation. it would take a lot to recreate all that "noise" consistently, but i'm open to suggestions on how to make it more secure
  • Help libraries won’t work on the IDE for esp32
    1 project | /r/arduino | 26 Dec 2022
    However on the github page and assuming I found the right source - and this is a HUGE ASSUMPTION - there is a section on porting the library to other platforms.
  • redbean: a single-file actually portable web server with Lua, HTTPS and SQLite
    4 projects | /r/lua | 31 Aug 2022
    Rebean is a single executable written in ANSI C that embeds Lua 5.4, MbedTLS and SQLite. The crazy thing about this is that it is a C binary that runs on six operating systems without any cross compiling thanks to leveraging Justine Tunney's cosmopolitan.
  • Install mbedTLS on Linux
    2 projects | /r/embedded | 3 Jul 2022
    it looks like the commands are all built under https://github.com/Mbed-TLS/mbedtls/tree/development/programs and the arch mbedtls package does some extra work to rename them and copy them into /usr/local/bin: https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-community/blob/packages/mbedtls/trunk/PKGBUILD#L55
  • Elliptic Curve Cryptography Explained
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 May 2021
    If you want to see a real implemention of arbitrary sized integer math, mbedTLS is a great example:

    https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbedtls/blob/development/library/...

    All of the ECC code in that library relies on this code, which can be accelerated by dedicated hardware.

  • C Deep
    80 projects | dev.to | 27 Feb 2021
    mbed TLS - Another crypto implementation. Apache-2.0
  • WireGuard implementation for LwIP stack
    1 project | /r/WireGuard | 22 Feb 2021
    Definitely, FreeRTOS + LwIP + Mbed TLS is a fairly common combo these days, and Mbed TLS has hardware acceleration where possible.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing LibreSSL and mbedTLS you can also consider the following projects:

OpenSSL - TLS/SSL and crypto library

GnuTLS - GnuTLS

wolfssl - The wolfSSL library is a small, fast, portable implementation of TLS/SSL for embedded devices to the cloud. wolfSSL supports up to TLS 1.3!

libsodium - A modern, portable, easy to use crypto library.

Crypto++ - free C++ class library of cryptographic schemes

Botan - Cryptography Toolkit

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.

GnuPG - Mirror of git://git.gnupg.org/gnupg.git — master branch contains no changes from upstream.

mbedcrypto - a portable, small, easy to use and fast c++14 library for cryptography.