At the face to face
last year we discussed future funding models, and we are exploring a range of
possible options. One suggestion raised was we could sell more support
contracts and give those support contract users patches for security issues in
advance.
But before we can even discuss this as an option we would have to change
our public stance. Our security policy since 2014 has stated we would
not do this and currently reads:
The OpenSSL OMC met last month for a two-day face-to-face meeting in London,
and like previous F2F meetings, most of the team was present and we addressed
a great many issues. This blog posts talks about some of them,
and most of the others will get their own blog posts, or notices, later.
Red Hat graciously hosted us for the two days, and both Red Hat and Cryptsoft
covered the costs of their employees who attended.
One of the overall threads of the meeting was about increasing the
transparency of the project. By default, everything should be done in
public. We decided to try some major changes to email and such.
Today I have had great pleasure in attending the Real World Crypto 2018
conference in Zürich in order to receive the
Levchin prize on behalf of the OpenSSL team.
The Levchin prize for Real World Cryptography recognises up to two groups or
individuals each year who have made significant advances in the practice of
cryptography and its use in real-world systems. This year one of the two
recipients is the OpenSSL team. The other recipient is
Hugo Krawczyk.
We had been invited to spend time with the open source community in China
by one of the developers - Paul Yang - who
participates in the OpenSSL project. A number of the team members had
communicated via email over the last year and when the suggestion was made
there were enough of us willing and interested to visit China for a “tour”
to make sense. So the tour was agreed as a good thing and that started
the journey that lead to spending a week in China (last week as I write
this on the plane on the way back to Australia).
Over the past few years we’ve come to the realisation that there is a surprising
(to us) amount of interest in OpenSSL in China. That shouldn’t have been a surprise
as China is a huge technologically advanced country, but now we know better thanks
to correspondence with many new Chinese contacts and the receipt of significant
support from multiple Chinese donors (most notably from Smartisan.
We have accepted an invitation from BaishanCloud to
visit China in person and meet with interested OpenSSL users and stakeholders in September.
We’d like to thank BaishanCloud for hosting us and Paul Yang and his colleagues there
for the substantial amount of work that went into arranging this trip.
We’ve had a change in the stakeholder aspect of this new FIPS 140 validation effort.
The original sponsor, SafeLogic, with whom we jump-started
this effort a year ago and who has worked with us since then, is taking a well-deserved
bow due to a change in circumstances. Supporting this effort has been quite a strain for
a relatively small company, but SafeLogic has left us in a fairly good position. Without
SafeLogic we wouldn’t have made it this far, and while I don’t anticipate any future
SafeLogic involvement with this effort from this point on, I remain enormously grateful
to SafeLogic and CEO Ray Potter for taking on such a bold and ambitious venture.
It’s been almost a year since plans for a new FIPS 140 validation were
first announced.
Several factors have led to this long delay. For one, we chose to focus
our limited manpower resources on higher priority objectives such as the
TLS 1.3 implementation. SafeLogic has also experienced difficulties in
obtaining the funding for their intended sponsorship; potential sponsors can
contact them directly.
With TLS 1.3 now done (pending only a final TLS 1.3 specification) we’re
now in a position to turn our attention to the new FIPS module, and just
in the nick of time Oracle has pledged enough funding to get us off to a
good start. With financial support from the Linux Foundation Core
Infrastructure Initiative temporarily interrupted, leaving a team member with
no income, that funding eases the pressure to seek new long term employment.
The following is a press release that we just released, with the cooperation
and financial support of the Core Infrastructure Initiative and the
Linux Foundation.
In the next few days we’ll start sending out email to all contributors
asking them to approve the change. In the meantime, you can visit
the licensing website and search for
your name and request the email. If you have changed email addresses,
or want to raise other issues about the license change, please email
license@openssl.org. You can also post
general issues to
openssl-users@openssl.org.
We are grateful to all the contributors who have contributed to OpenSSL
and look forward to their help and support in this effort.
The official press release can be found at the CII website. The rest of this post is a copy:
Last October, the OpenSSL Project team had a face to face meeting.
We talked about many topics but one of them was that, in recent years, we have
seen much more involvement from the community and that we would like to
encourage that further. For example, there are a number of people in the
community who we know and trust. We would like those people to get involved more
and make it easier for them to contribute. We decided to introduce the
concept of a “committer” (borrowed from the Apache concept): someone who has the
ability to commit code to our source code repository but without necessarily
having to become a full team member. This might be seen as a stepping-stone for
someone who aspires to full team membership, or simply as an easier way of
contributing for those that don’t. Those people could help with our review
process (i.e., their reviews would count towards approval) - which might help us
keep on top of the github issues and pull request queues.