20 years ago, on the 23rd December 1998, the first version of OpenSSL was released. OpenSSL was not the original name planned for the project but it was changed over just a few hours before the site went live. Let’s take a look at some of the early history of OpenSSL as some of the background has not been documented before.
The OpenSSL Management Committee has been looking at the versioning scheme that is currently in use. Over the years we’ve received plenty of feedback about the “uniqueness” of this scheme, and it does cause some confusion for some users. We would like to adopt a more typical version numbering approach.
The current versioning scheme has this format:
MAJOR.MINOR.FIX[PATCH]
The new scheme will have this format:
MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH
In practical terms our “letter” patch releases become patch numbers and “fix” is dropped from the concept. In future, API/ABI compatibility will only be guaranteed for the same MAJOR version number. Previously we guaranteed API/ABI compatibility across the same MAJOR.MINOR combination. This more closely aligns with the expectations of users who are familiar with semantic versioning. We are not at this stage directly adopting semantic versioning because it would mean changing our current LTS policies and practices.
The OpenSSL Management Committee (OMC) on behalf of the OpenSSL Project would like to formally express its thanks to the following organisations for agreeing to sponsor the next FIPS validation effort: Akamai Technologies, Blue Cedar, NetApp, Oracle, VMware.
Four weeks ago, the OpenSSL team gathered with many of the organisations sponsoring the next FIPS module for a face-to-face meeting in Brisbane, Australia.
We got a great deal accomplished during that week. Having most of the fips-sponsor organisations in the same location helps ensure that we are all on the same page for the decisions we need to make going forward.
After two years of work we are excited to be releasing our latest version today - OpenSSL 1.1.1. This is also our new Long Term Support (LTS) version and so we are committing to support it for at least five years.
OpenSSL 1.1.1 has been a huge team effort with nearly 5000 commits having been made from over 200 individual contributors since the release of OpenSSL 1.1.0. These statistics just illustrate the amazing vitality and diversity of the OpenSSL community. The contributions didn’t just come in the form of commits though. There has been a great deal of interest in this new version so thanks needs to be extended to the large number of users who have downloaded the beta releases to test them out and report bugs.
Back around the end of 2014 we posted our release strategy. This was the first time we defined support timelines for our releases, and added the concept of an LTS (long-term support) release. At our OMC meeting earlier this month, we picked our next LTS release. This post walks through that announcement, and tries to explain all the implications of it.
The following is a press release that we just put out about how finishing off our relicensing effort. For the impatient, please see https://license.openssl.org/trying-to-find to help us find the last people; we want to change the license with our next release, which is currently in Alpha, and tentatively set for May.
For background, you can see all posts in the license tag.
One copy of the press release is at https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/openssl-seeking-last-group-of-contributors-300607162.html.
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.
There have been more articles written based on the interviews with Paul Yang from BaishanCloud, Tim Hudson, and Steve Marquess from the OpenSSL team.
These join the articles noted in the previous blog entry.