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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.

Press Coverage

There have been more articles written based on the interviews with Paul Yang from BaishanCloud, Tim Hudson, and Steve Marquess from the OpenSSL team.

• AQNIU
• TechTarget
• ScienceNet

These join the articles noted in the previous blog entry.

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’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.

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.