We have started the work on extending wolfSSL to provide the necessary API calls to power QUIC and HTTP/3 implementations!

Small, fast and FIPS

The TLS library known as wolfSSL is already very often a top choice when users are looking for a small and yet very fast TLS stack that supports all the latest protocol features; including TLS 1.3 support – open source with commercial support available.

As manufacturers of IoT devices and other systems with memory, CPU and footprint constraints are looking forward to following the Internet development and switching over to upcoming QUIC and HTTP/3 protocols, wolfSSL is here to help users take that step.

A QUIC reminder

In case you have forgot, here’s a schematic view of HTTPS stacks, old vs new. On the right side you can see HTTP/3, QUIC and the little TLS 1.3 box there within QUIC.

ngtcp2

There are no plans to write a full QUIC stack. There are already plenty of those. We’re talking about adjustments and extensions of the existing TLS library API set to make sure wolfSSL can be used as the TLS component in a QUIC stack.

One of the leading QUIC stacks and so far the only one I know of that does this, ngtcp2 is written to be TLS library agnostic and allows different TLS libraries to be plugged in as different backends. I believe it makes perfect sense to make such a plugin for wolfSSL to be a sensible step as soon as there’s code to try out.

A neat effect of that, would be that once wolfSSL works as a backend to ngtcp2, it should be possible to do full-fledged HTTP/3 transfers using curl powered by ngtcp2+wolfSSL. Contact us with other ideas for QUIC stacks you would like us to test wolfSSL with!

FIPS 140-2

We expect wolfSSL to be the first FIPS-based implementation to add support for QUIC. I hear this is valuable to a number of users.

When

This work begins now and this is just a blog post of our intentions. We and I will of course love to get your feedback on this and whatever else that is related. We’re also interested to get in touch with people and companies who want to be early testers of our implementation. You know where to find us!

I can promise you that the more interest we can sense to exist for this effort, the sooner we will see the first code to test out.

It seems likely that we’re not going to support any older TLS drafts for QUIC than draft-29.