After eight months of development, the release of the OpenSSL 3.2.0 library has been finalized, featuring implementations of SSL/TLS protocols and various encryption algorithms. Support for OpenSSL 3.2 will continue until November 23, 2025. Support for previous branches, OpenSSL 3.1 and 3.0 LTS, will last until March 2025 and September 2026, respectively. Support for branch 1.1.1 will end in September this year. The project's code is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license.
Key innovations in OpenSSL 3.2.0:
- Client support for the QUIC protocol (RFC 9000) has been added, which is used as a transport in the HTTP/3 protocol. The implementation includes, among other features, the ability to transmit multiple streams over a single connection. Components for using QUIC on servers will be included in the OpenSSL 3.3 release, which is planned to be published no later than April 30, 2024.
QUIC is an overlay protocol over UDP that supports multiplexing multiple connections and provides encryption methods equivalent to TLS/SSL. The protocol was created in 2013 by Google as an alternative to the TCP+TLS stack for the Web, addressing issues with long connection setup and negotiation times in TCP and eliminating delays due to packet loss during data transmission.
- In TLS, support for an extension for certificate compression during the connection negotiation phase (RFC 8879) has been implemented, allowing for faster connection establishment since the transmission of certificate data constitutes a significant portion of the traffic during the connection negotiation phase. Compression is supported using the zlib, zstd, and Brotli libraries.
- Support for deterministic ECDSA signatures (Deterministic ECDSA, RFC 6979) has been added, in which a hash HMAC-SHA256 of the private key and the signed message text is used instead of a random sequence during signature generation, allowing for the same signature to be consistently produced in different signing operations while preventing data leakage that could be used to determine the private key (the private key can be derived if at least two signatures for different data are generated using a repeating random sequence).
- Support for extended Ed25519 and Ed448 public key digital signature variants has been added: Ed25519ctx, Ed25519ph, and Ed448ph (RFC 8032).
- Support for the AES-GCM-SIV encryption mode (RFC 8452) has been added, which combines the high performance of GCM (Galois/Counter Mode) with resistance to nonce reuse leaks.
- The Argon2 key generation function (RFC 9106) has been implemented, which won the password hashing function competition in 2015. Thread pool support has also been added.
- Support for hybrid encryption based on the HPKE (Hybrid Public Key Encryption, RFC 9180) mechanism has been added, which combines the simplicity of key transmission in public key encryption with the high performance of symmetric encryption (data is encrypted with a fast symmetric key, and the key itself is encrypted with a slow asymmetric one).
- TLS has implemented the ability to use 'raw' public keys (RFC 7250).
- Support for TCP Fast Open (TFO, RFC 7413) has been added, which reduces the number of connection setup steps by combining the first and second steps of the classic three-step connection agreement process into one request, allowing data to be sent during the initial connection setup phase.
- TLS has implemented support for pluggable digital signature schemes, allowing the use of third-party implementations of algorithms, for example, for using quantum-resistant algorithms in TLS.
- Support for secure Brainpool elliptic curves has been added in TLS 1.3.
- Support for SM4-XTS processor instructions has been added.
- On the Windows platform, the ability to use the system root certificate store has been implemented (disabled by default). To access certificates in the Windows store, the URI 'org.openssl.winstore://' is proposed.
Source: opennet.ru
