3 ms·

I am not defending OpenSSL but I am not sure your comparisons are very informative and quite frankly some of your sloccounts seem to wander far away from fact.

by dfc 13y ago

I am not defending OpenSSL but I am not sure your comparisons are very informative and quite frankly some of your sloccounts seem to wander far away from fact. > OpenBSD has had two holes in a heck of a long time Two remote holes in the default install. The default install is configured in such a way as to minimize the attack surface area. Do you know what services are configured to respond to public internet traffic in the default install? OpenSSL on the other hand essentially is always interacting with public internet traffic. Do you use OpenBSD on your desktop and laptop? > 453,000 or so lines, more than five times the size of xv6 Are you referring to Xv6, "the simple Unix-like teaching operating system" a project designed for education and not commercial service offerings? How does this comparison of the size of xv6/OpenSSL inform the debate? The Linux kernel has 12 million lines of code. What should I conclude from this number compared to OpenSSL? Do you think some of PolarSSL's failures with frankencerts can be explained by how small the code base is? Please see the addendum for more sloccount discussion. > Do believe that aspiring to the security...even at the cost of features? I don't mean to be difficult but I have no idea what you are asking here. Which features are you referring to? Without some specificity of "cost of features" this seems to be more about showmanship and rhetorical style than fostering meaningful debate. Do you run OpenBSD on your desktop/laptop? > Why should I use OpenSSL for TLS termination when formally validated alternatives exist? What are these alternatives? I did not realize there were multiple formally validated alternatives to OpenSSL. Maybe we have different opinions about "alternatives" versus "implementations." SLOCCOUNT Addendum: I did not want to inject a pile of sloccount data in the main body of my comment but I do have some questions about your counts. After a little research it seems that your numbers might be somewhat hand wavy which is unfortunate because you gave no indication of this in your comment. What versions of OpenSSL and PolarSSL are you referring to? My count for OpenSSL 1.0.1g puts it at 6.5 times the size of PolarSSL and not the 10 times that you stated in your comment. I could not connect to OpenSSL.org so I do not know if they have released a version since April 7th but I must say I am surprised that that the OpenSSL dev team added 91,344 lines (25% increase) in the last seven days. And even if they did that still puts them 90,000 lines short of "ten times the size of PolarSSL." My sloccount data: # OpenSSL 1.0.1g: Totals grouped by language (dominant language first): ansic: 273820 (75.71%) perl: 69192 (19.13%) asm: 11015 (3.05%) cpp: 4367 (1.21%) sh: 3238 (0.90%) lisp: 24 (0.01%) Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 361,656 # PolarSSL 1.3.6-gpl Totals grouped by language (dominant language first): ansic: 52212 (94.71%) sh: 2165 (3.93%) perl: 748 (1.36%) tcl: 4 (0.01%) Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 55,129 # Linux kernel 3.14 Totals grouped by language (dominant language first): ansic: 11828087 (97.00%) asm: 275047 (2.26%) !!!TRIMMED counts < 0.5%!!! Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 12,193,312 # Xv6 Totals grouped by language (dominant language first): ansic: 7022 (87.81%) sh: 481 (6.01%) asm: 301 (3.76%) perl: 189 (2.36%) lisp: 4 (0.05%) Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 7,997

wbl 13y ago
You are correct: I meant 10x the size of xv6 and 5 times that of PolarSSL. I used wc, so comments and blanks count. xv6 implements a multiuser operating system. This is not an easy undertaking by any means, and far more complex than TLS in terms of conditions to satisfy. As for the rest of your comment, I have used OpenBSD on the desktop. I have never found the lack of a webserver running, or anything but sshd to be a hindrance to making a machine on which with a browser I can read papers, bank, listen to music, and program. sshd is of course attackable by anyone: good luck getting in though. Other OS's have followed OpenBSD, as do most hardening guides. One of the features OpenSSL has is support for ciphers that long ago have been disabled, together with out-of-date TLS versions such as SSLv2(!). TLS is a specification, with multiple implementations. The specification is of poor quality, the protocol worse, but OpenSSL is in a class by itself, including implementations of national ciphers no one uses. While Frankencerts were an issue, there was no realistic way to turn the two incorrect "OKAY" and the one "NOT OKAY" result of PolarSSL into an attack. You would need a CA to issue a cert with a start time in the future. It also does not take an enormous amount of code to fix this issue.

by dfc 13y ago

wbl 13y ago

You are correct: I meant 10x the size of xv6 and 5 times that of PolarSSL. I used wc, so comments and blanks count. xv6 implements a multiuser operating system. This is not an easy undertaking by any means, and far more complex than TLS in terms of conditions to satisfy. As for the rest of your comment, I have used OpenBSD on the desktop. I have never found the lack of a webserver running, or anything but sshd to be a hindrance to making a machine on which with a browser I can read papers, bank, listen to music, and program. sshd is of course attackable by anyone: good luck getting in though. Other OS's have followed OpenBSD, as do most hardening guides. One of the features OpenSSL has is support for ciphers that long ago have been disabled, together with out-of-date TLS versions such as SSLv2(!). TLS is a specification, with multiple implementations. The specification is of poor quality, the protocol worse, but OpenSSL is in a class by itself, including implementations of national ciphers no one uses. While Frankencerts were an issue, there was no realistic way to turn the two incorrect "OKAY" and the one "NOT OKAY" result of PolarSSL into an attack. You would need a CA to issue a cert with a start time in the future. It also does not take an enormous amount of code to fix this issue.