87 lines
3.9 KiB
HTML
87 lines
3.9 KiB
HTML
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<base href="https://beckmeyer.us/">
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<title>Moving Back To OpenSSL – Joel Beckmeyer's Blog</title>
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<a href="https://beckmeyer.us/">Joel Beckmeyer's Blog</a>
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<li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
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<h1>Moving Back To OpenSSL</h1>
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<div class="title-header-date">
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<time>Monday, March 22, 2021</time>
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</div>
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</div>
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<p>Void Linux <a href="https://voidlinux.org/news/2021/02/OpenSSL.html">recently announced</a>
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that they were going to move back to OpenSSL after originally <a href="https://voidlinux.org/news/2014/08/LibreSSL-by-default.html">switching to
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LibreSSL in 2014</a>.
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It seems that there are a lot of things at play here.</p>
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<p>It seems that the main focus of the recent announcement is on the maintainability
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and other difficulties of not using the <em>one true SSL/TLS library</em>. To me,
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this pragmatically makes sense. However, every time something like this happens
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I get this lingering feeling of worry…</p>
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<p>Microsoft moving their default browser from their own implementation to
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Chromium, and other browsers following suit.</p>
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<p>Linux distributions moving <em>en masse</em> to <strong>systemd</strong>.</p>
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<p>Distributed email being slowly crushed and killed by Google with GMail.</p>
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<p>And many other examples that aren’t immediately coming to mind.</p>
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<p>I think it’s great that OpenSSL as a project has made a comeback from the
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Heartbleed fiasco, and that it is apparently more actively developed nowadays,
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but the fact that we are even at the point of moving back to OpenSSL due to
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difficulties with building software is worrying. To me, it looks like a
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symptom of software becoming too entrenched and dependent on a single piece
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of software.</p>
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<p>This kind of accusation coming from anyone is going to be hypocritical, since
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we all depend on Linux, X11, Wayland, systemd, or some common piece of software
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that we take for granted and don’t lose sleep over. However, I think what’s
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categorically different about this one is that an alternative was adopted,
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worked on, but eventually “failed” (at least for Void, but also possibly for
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Linux as well).</p>
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<p>I don’t know what the fix for this specific issue would be. I’m not nearly
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familiar enough with SSL/TLS or how you would develop software to be agnostic
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of dependencies like this. But I think in order to honor principles like
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the Unix philosophy, the KISS principle, and countless others, we need to
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figure out a way to be more modular for dependency issues like this.</p>
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<div class="footer">
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<p>Have any questions? Let me know on <a href="https://matrix.to/#/@joel:thebeckmeyers.xyz">Matrix</a>, or start a discussion on <a href="https://social.beckmeyer.us/TinfoilSubmarine">Fediverse</a>!</p>
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