2 OpenSSL STATUS Last modified at
3 ______________ $Date: 1999/01/30 17:34:59 $
7 o OpenSSL 0.9.2: Under development.
8 o OpenSSL 0.9.1c: Released on December 23th, 1998
16 o Steve is currently working on:
17 X509 V3 extension code including:
18 1. Support for the more common PKIX extensions.
19 2. Proper (or at least usable) certificate chain verification.
20 3. Support in standard applications (req, x509, ca).
21 4. Documentation on how all the above works.
22 Next on the list is probably PKCS#12 integration.
28 o The Makefile hierarchy and build mechanism is still not a round thing:
30 1. The config vs. Configure scripts
31 It's the same nasty situation as for Apache with APACI vs.
32 src/Configure. It confuses.
33 Suggestion: Merge Configure and config into a single configure
34 script with a Autoconf style interface ;-) and remove
35 Configure and config. Or even let us use GNU Autoconf
36 itself. Then we can avoid a lot of those platform checks
37 which are currently in Configure.
39 2. The xxx.org -> xxx.h generation:
40 It's not obvious for which file xxx.org is the source.
41 Suggestion: Rename xxx.org to xxx.h.in (Autoconf style), this way
42 one sees that xxx.h.in is the input for xxx.h
44 o The installation under "make install" produces a very
45 installation layout: $prefix/certs and $prefix/private dirs. That's
46 not nice. Ralf suggests to move the two certs and private dirs either
47 to $prefix/etc/, $prefix/lib/ or $prefix/share. Alternatively
48 we could also not install the certs at all.
50 Status: Ralf +1 for both not installing the certs at all and
51 moving it to $prefix/etc/. +0 for $prefix/lib/
53 Paul: why is it not nice?
54 Ralf: because it messes up the install dir when
55 $prefix is not a dedicated area like /usr/local/ssl.
56 When we move them to a standard subdir like
57 etc/ lib/ or share/ we don't mess up things
58 when $prefix is /usr or /usr/local, etc.
59 Additionally it makes package vendors life
62 o Support for Shared Libraries has to be added at least
63 for the major Unix platforms. The details we can rip from the stuff
64 Ralf has done for the Apache src/Configure script. Ben wants the
65 solution to be really simple.
67 Status: Ralf will look how we can easily incorporate the
68 compiler PIC and linker DSO flags from Apache
69 into the OpenSSL Configure script.
71 o The perl/ stuff needs a major overhaul. Currently it's
72 totally obsolete. Either we clean it up and enhance it to be up-to-date
73 with the C code or we also could replace it with the really nice
74 Net::SSLeay package we can find under
75 http://www.neuronio.pt/SSLeay.pm.html. Ralf uses this package for a
76 longer time and it works fine and is a nice Perl module. Best would be
77 to convince the author to work for the OpenSSL project and create a
78 Net::OpenSSL or Crypt::OpenSSL package out of it and maintains it for
81 Status: Ralf thinks we should both contact the author of Net::SSLeay
82 and look how much effort it is to bring Eric's perl/ stuff up
86 o The EVP and ASN1 stuff is a mess. Currently you have one EVP_CIPHER
87 structure for each cipher. This may make sense for things like DES but
88 for variable length ciphers like RC2 and RC4 it is NBG. Need a way to
89 use the EVP interface and set up the cipher parameters. The ASN1 stuff
90 is also foo wrt ciphers whose AlgorithmIdentifier has more than just
91 an IV in it (e.g. RC2, RC5). This also means that EVP_Seal and EVP_Open
92 don't work unless the key length matches the fixed value (some vendors
93 use a key length decided by the size of the RSA encrypted key and expect
99 "How about making the each of the locations compile-time defined. I
100 would like to (for example) put binaries in /usr/bin, configuration
101 data, certs and keys in /etc/openssl/certs and /etc/openssl/keys, etc.
102 This would also be a great boon to binary package makers. The
103 SSLeay-0.9.1b RPM already includes some patches which do some of this.
104 I can forward them if you wish."