LibreSSL / OpenBSD Foundation

[pfSense_fan 181]

In the wake of the Heartbleed Bug, the OpenBSD Foundation has begun a fork of the OpenSSL source code. Enter LibreSSL.

 

In one week they have removed 90,000 lines of C code and 150,000 lines of content that they say was old or unused.

 

For those not familiar with OpenBSD, they are a non-profit and are security centric in the coding of their software. Part of their culture is to frequently perform group audits of their code. PF, or Packet Filter, was originally designed by them and is the underlying firewall engine of pfSense, which I trust to keep me secure. As Pointed out by another user, they also maintain the OpenSSH project, used by many. In short they for a long time have played a big part in keeping many of us secure.

 

They are implementing the first release of LibreSSL into OpenBSD 5.6 and then working on porting it to other OS's

 

For other OS's

Coming Soon Please Be Patient

 

Multi OS support will happen once we have

• Flensed, refactored, rewritten, and fixed enough of the code so we have stable baseline that we trust and can be maintained/improved.
• The right Portability team in place.
• A Stable Commitment of Funding to support an increased development and porting effort.

We know you all want this tomorrow. We are working as fast as we can but our primary focus is good software that we trust to run ourselves. We don't want to break your heart.

 

I personally am excited about this. I think this has good potential for future releases of OpenVPN and ultimately our uses with VPN.

 

This perhaps might be a good candidate for AirVPN's No-Profit Community initiative. While some may consider this sentiment premature, this seems like a probable evolution of the Open Source SSL Library most will end up using. It only makes sense as their team seems to keep up with routine audits.

 

Further reading:

http://www.libressl.org/

http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/

http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/openssl-code-beyond-repair-claims-creator-of-libressl-fork/

[Staff 10014]

05/06/2014, Funded with 1000€ (1355 USD). https://airvpn.org/mission/