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Hello dear Gentoo Devs, |
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this is somewhat written out of frustration so please bear with me ;) |
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|
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CCing crypto@ in case they can provide some valuable input to the |
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topic. If not, sorry guys for wasting your time. |
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As you might have noticed, although being published back in August |
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2016, we still have openssl-1.1 in package.mask due to the numerous |
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build issues we still have with various packages[1] that uses openssl. |
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"Why is that so?" do I hear you asking. "Debian already switched over |
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to openssl-1.1 for months already". |
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Well... the did not entirely switch yet. There are still packages that |
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are being compiled/linked against openssl-1.0 in Debian because their |
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respective upstreams refuse to collaborate. |
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The most prominent example is openssh[2] which also is the reason that |
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this topic gives me so much frustration. They simply refuse to add |
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compatibility code for openssl-1.1 because openssl upstream did such a |
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silly move with making lots of interfaces opaque and make openssl-1.1 |
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mostly incompatible with code written against older openssl versions. |
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This and the fact that you can build openssl-1.1 with three different |
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API versions (0.9.8, 1.0.0 and 1.1.0) makes it exceptionally hard for |
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openssl consumers to migrate their code to openssl-1.1. |
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openssh upstream even raised the idea to simply focus crypto support in |
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their software on libressl which I personally think is a really bad |
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move. But coming from the same people (openssh and libressl are both |
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developed by OpenBSD people), it's no big surprise this idea came up at |
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some point. |
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So, basically openssl is the last big showstopper for openssl-1.1 to |
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get out of p.mask. There are some inofficial patches floating around in |
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the WWW but each one of them has some issues and they all are not |
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really small in size. |
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Last time I checked, the most complete (but still to some degree |
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broken) patch had 2800+ LOC and was 80K in size. This is definitely |
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nothing I want to maintain as downstream, left aside the fact that |
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openssh should not be messed with lightly regarding security |
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implications. |
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My biggest concern right now is that openssh might still block |
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openssl-1.1.1 once that got released. openssl-1.1.1 provides TLSv1.3 |
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which is something we should provide to our users as soon as possible |
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and is also targeted as next LTS release. |
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[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/592438 |
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[2] https://bugs.gentoo.org/592578 |
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|
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-- |
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Lars Wendler |
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Gentoo package maintainer |
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GPG: 21CC CF02 4586 0A07 ED93 9F68 498F E765 960E 9B39 |
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