Tag Archives: LibreSSL

cURL and libcurl

A family of forks

2 Comments

curl supports getting built with eleven different TLS libraries. Six of these libraries are OpenSSL or forks of OpenSSL. Allow me to give you a glimpse of their differences, similarities and some insights into what it takes to support them all.

SSLeay

It all started with SSLeay. This was the first SSL library I found out to exist and we added the first HTTPS support to curl using this library in the spring of 1998. Apparently the SSLeay project was started already back in 1995.

This was back in the days we still only had SSL; TLS would come later.

OpenSSL

This project was created (forked) from the ashes of SSLeay in late 1998 and curl supported it already from its start. SSLeay was abandoned.

OpenSSL always had a quirky, inconsistent and extremely large API set (a good chunk of that was inherited from SSLeay), that is further complicated by documentation that is sparse at best and leaves a lot to the users’ imagination and skill to dig through source code to get the last details answered (still today in 2025). In curl we keep getting occasional problems reported with how we use this library even decades in. Presumably this is the same for every OpenSSL user out there.

The OpenSSL project is often criticized for having dropped the ball on performance since they went to version 3 a few years back. They have also been slow and/or unwilling at adopt new TLS technologies like for QUIC and ECH.

In spite of all this, OpenSSL has become a dominant TLS library especially in Open Source.

LibreSSL

Back in the days of Heartbleed, the LibreSSL forked off and became its own. They trimmed off things they think didn’t belong in the library, they created their own TLS library API and a few years in, Apple ships curl on macOS using LibreSSL. They have some local patches on their build to make it behave differently than others.

LibreSSL was late to offer QUIC, they don’t support SSLKEYLOGFILE, ECH and generally seem to be even slower than OpenSSL to implement new things these days.

curl has worked perfectly with LibreSSL since it was created.

BoringSSL

Forked off by Google in the Heartbleed days. Done by Google for Google without any public releases they have cleaned up the prototypes and variable types a lot, and were leading the QUIC API push. In general, most new TLS inventions have since been implemented and supported by BoringSSL before the other forks.

Google uses this in Android in other places.

curl has worked perfectly with BoringSSL since it was created.

AmiSSL

A fork or flavor of OpenSSL done for the sole purpose of making it build and run properly on AmigaOS. I don’t know much about it but included it here for completeness. It seems to be more or less a port of OpenSSL for Amiga.

curl works with AmiSSL when built for AmigaOS.

QuicTLS

As OpenSSL dragged their feet and refused to provide the QUIC API the other forks did back in the early 2020s (for reasons I have yet to see anyone explain), Microsoft and Akamai forked OpenSSL and produced QuicTLS which has since tried to be a light-weight fork that mostly just adds the QUIC API in the same style BoringSSL and LibreSSL support. Light-weight in the meaning that they were tracking upstream closely and did not intend to deviate from that in other ways than the QUIC API.

With OpenSSL3.5 they finally shipped a QUIC API that is different than the QUIC API the forks (including QuicTLS) provide. I believe this triggered QuicTLS to reconsider their direction going forward but we are still waiting to see exactly how.

curl has worked perfectly with QuicTLS since it was created.

AWS-LC

This is a fork off BoringSSL maintained by Amazon. As opposed to BoringSSL, they do actual (frequent) releases and therefore seem like a project even non-Amazon users could actually use and rely on – even though their stated purpose for existing is to maintain a secure libcrypto that is compatible with software and applications used at AWS. Strikingly, they maintain more than “just” libcrypto though.

This fork has shown a lot of activity recently, even in the core parts. Benchmarks done by the HAProxy team in May 2025 shows that AWS-LC outperforms OpenSSL significantly.

The API AWS-LC offers is not identical to BoringSSL’s.

curl works perfectly with AWS-LC since early 2023.

Family Tree

The OpenSSL fork family tree

The family life

Each of these six different forks has its own specifics, APIs and features that also change and varies over their different versions. We remain supporting these six forks for now as people still seem to use them and maintenance is manageable.

We support all of them using the same single source code with an ever-growing #ifdef maze, and we verify builds using the forks in CI – albeit only with a limited set of recent versions.

Over time, the forks seem to be slowly drifting apart more and more. I don’t think it has yet become a concern, but we are of course monitoring the situation and might at some point have to do some internal refactors to cater for this.

Future

I can’t foresee what is going to happen. If history is a lesson, we seem to rather go towards more forks rather than fewer, but every reader of this blog post of course now ponders over how much duplicated efforts are spent on all these forks and the implied inefficiencies of that. On the libraries themselves but also on users such as curl.

I suppose we just have to wait and see.

cURL and libcurl, Network, Open Source, Security

Play TLS 1.3 with curl

The IESG recently approved the TLS 1.3 draft-28 for proposed standard and we can expect the real RFC for this protocol version to appear soon (within a few months probably).

TLS 1.3 has been in development for quite some time by now, and a lot of TLS libraries already support it to some extent. At varying draft levels.

curl and libcurl has supported an explicit option to select TLS 1.3 since curl 7.52.0 (December 2016) and assuming you build curl to use a TLS library with support, you’ve been able to use TLS 1.3 with curl since at least then. The support has gradually been expanded to cover more and more libraries since then.

Today, curl and libcurl support speaking TLS 1.3 if you build it to use one of these fine TLS libraries of a recent enough version:

  • OpenSSL
  • BoringSSL
  • libressl
  • NSS
  • WolfSSL
  • Secure Transport (on iOS 11 or later, and macOS 10.13 or later)

GnuTLS seems to be well on their way too. TLS 1.3 support exists in the GnuTLS master branch on gitlab.

curl’s TLS 1.3-support makes it possible to select TLS 1.3 as preferred minimum version.

cURL and libcurl, Open Source

What’s new in curl

4 Comments

CURL keyboardWe just shipped our 150th public release of curl. On December 2, 2015.

curl 7.46.0

One hundred and fifty public releases done during almost 18 years makes a little more than 8 releases per year on average. In mid November 2015 we also surpassed 20,000 commits in the git source code repository.

With the constant and never-ending release train concept of just another release every 8 weeks that we’re using, no release is ever the grand big next release with lots of bells and whistles. Instead we just add a bunch of things, fix a bunch of bugs, release and then loop. With no fanfare and without any press-stopping marketing events.

So, instead of just looking at what was made in this last release, because you can check that out yourself in our changelog, I wanted to take a look at the last two years and have a moment to show you want we have done in this period. curl and libcurl are the sort of tool and library that people use for a long time and a large number of users have versions installed that are far older than two years and hey, now I’d like to tease you and tell you what can be yours if you take the step straight into the modern day curl or libcurl.

Thanks

Before we dive into the real contents, let’s not fool ourselves and think that we managed these years and all these changes without the tireless efforts and contributions from hundreds of awesome hackers. Thank you everyone! I keep calling myself lead developer of curl but it truly would not not exist without all the help I get.

We keep getting a steady stream of new contributors and quality patches. Our problem is rather to review and receive the contributions in a timely manner. In a personal view, I would also like to just add that during these two last years I’ve had support from my awesome employer Mozilla that allows me to spend a part of my work hours on curl.

What happened the last 2 years in curl?

We released curl and libcurl 7.34.0 on December 17th 2013 (12 releases ago). What  did we do since then that could be worth mentioning? Well, a lot, and then I’m going to mostly skip the almost 900 bug fixes we did in this time.

Many security fixes

Almost half (18 out of 37) of the security vulnerabilities reported for our project were reported during the last two years. It may suggest a greater focus and more attention put on those details by users and developers. Security reports are a good thing, it means that we address and find problems. Yes it unfortunately also shows that we introduce security issues at times, but I consider that secondary, even if we of course also work on ways to make sure we’ll do this less in the future.

URL specific options: –next

A pretty major feature that was added to the command line tool without much bang or whistles. You can now add –next as a separator on the command line to “group” options for specific URLs. This allows you to run multiple different requests on URLs that still can re-use the same connection and so on. It opens up for lots of more fun and creative uses of curl and has in fact been requested on and off for the project’s entire life time!

HTTP/2

There’s a new protocol version in town and during the last two years it was finalized and its RFC went public. curl and libcurl supports HTTP/2, although you need to explicitly ask for it to be used still.

HTTP/2 is binary, multiplexed, uses compressed headers and offers server push. Since the command line tool is still serially sending and receiving data, the multiplexing and server push features can right now only get fully utilized by applications that use libcurl directly.

HTTP/2 in curl is powered by the nghttp2 library and it requires a fairly new TLS library that supports the ALPN extension to be fully usable for HTTPS. Since the browsers only support HTTP/2 over HTTPS, most HTTP/2 in the wild so far is done over HTTPS.

We’ve gradually implemented and provided more and more HTTP/2 features.

Separate proxy headers

For a very long time, there was no way to tell curl which custom headers to use when talking to a proxy and which to use when talking to the server. You’d just add a custom header to the request. This was never good and we eventually made it possible to specify them separately and then after the security alert on the same thing, we made it the default behavior.

Option man pages

We’ve had two user surveys as we now try to make it an annual spring tradition for the project. To learn what people use, what people think, what people miss etc. Both surveys have told us users think our documentation needs improvement and there has since been an extra push towards improving the documentation to make it more accessible and more readable.

One way to do that, has been to introduce separate, stand-alone, versions of man pages for each and very libcurl option. For the functions curl_easy_setopt, curl_multi_setopt and curl_easy_getinfo. Right now, that means 278 new man pages that are easier to link directly to, easier to search for with Google etc and they are now written with more text and more details for each individual option. In total, we now host and maintain 351 individual man pages.

The boringssl / libressl saga

The Heartbleed incident of April 2014 was a direct reason for libressl being created as a new fork of OpenSSL and I believe it also helped BoringSSL to find even more motivation for its existence.

Subsequently, libcurl can be built to use either one of these three forks based on the same origin.  This is however not accomplished without some amount of agony.

SSLv3 is also disabled by default

The continued number of problems detected in SSLv3 finally made it too get disabled by default in curl (together with SSLv2 which has been disabled by default for a while already). Now users need to explicitly ask for it in case they need it, and in some cases the TLS libraries do not even support them anymore. You may need to build your own binary to get the support back.

Everyone should move up to TLS 1.2 as soon as possible. HTTP/2 also requires TLS 1.2 or later when used over HTTPS.

support for the SMB/CIFS protocol

For the first time in many years we’ve introduced support for a new protocol, using the SMB:// and SMBS:// schemes. Maybe not the most requested feature out there, but it is another network protocol for transfers…

code of conduct

Triggered by several bad examples in other projects, we merged a code of conduct document into our source tree without much of a discussion, because this is the way this project always worked. This just makes it clear to newbies and outsiders in case there would ever be any doubt. Plus it offers a clear text saying what’s acceptable or not in case we’d ever come to a point where that’s needed. We’ve never needed it so far in the project’s very long history.

–data-raw

Just a tiny change but more a symbol of the many small changes and advances we continue doing. The –data option that is used to specify what to POST to a server can take a leading ‘@’ symbol and then a file name, but that also makes it tricky to actually send a literal ‘@’ plus it makes scripts etc forced to make sure it doesn’t slip in one etc.

–data-raw was introduced to only accept a string to send, without any ability to read from a file and not using ‘@’ for anything. If you include a ‘@’ in that string, it will be sent verbatim.

attempting VTLS as a lib

We support eleven different TLS libraries in the curl project – that is probably more than all other transfer libraries in existence do. The way we do this is by providing an internal API for TLS backends, and we call that ‘vtls’.

In 2015 we started made an effort in trying to make that into its own sub project to allow other open source projects and tools to use it. We managed to find a few hackers from the wget project also interested and to participate. Unfortunately I didn’t feel I could put enough effort or time into it to drive it forward much and while there was some initial work done by others it soon was obvious it wouldn’t go anywhere and we pulled the plug.

The internal vtls glue remains fine though!

pull-requests on github

Not really a change in the code itself but still a change within the project. In March 2015 we changed our policy regarding pull-requests done on github. The effect has been a huge increase in number of pull-requests and a slight shift in activity away from the mailing list over to github more. I think it has made it easier for casual contributors to send enhancements to the project but I don’t have any hard facts backing this up (and I wouldn’t know how to measure this).

… as mentioned in the beginning, there have also been hundreds of smaller changes and bug fixes. What fun will you help us make reality in the next two years?

cURL and libcurl, Network, Open Source, Security

The TLS trinity dance

2 Comments

In the curl project we currently support eleven different TLS libraries. That is 8 libraries and the OpenSSL “trinity” consisting of BoringSSL, libressl and of course OpenSSL itself.

You could easily be mislead into believing that supporting three libraries that all have a common base would be reallytrinity easy since they have the same API. But no, it isn’t. Sure, they have the same foundation and they all three have more in common that they differ but still, they all diverge in their own little ways and from my stand-point libressl seems to be the one that causes us the least friction going forward.

Let me also stress that I’m but a user of these projects, I don’t participate in their work and I don’t have any insights into their internal doings or greater goals.

libressl

Easy-peacy, very similar to OpenSSL. The biggest obstacle might be that the version numbering is different so an old program that might be adjusted to different OpenSSL features based on version numbers (like curl was) needs some adjusting. There’s a convenient LIBRESSL_VERSION_NUMBER define to detect libressl with.

OpenSSL

I regularly build curl against OpenSSL from their git master to get an early head-start when they change things and break backwards compatibility. They’ve increased that behavior since Heartbleed and while I generally agree with their ambitions on making more structs opaque instead of exposing all internals, it also hurts us over and over again when they remove things we’ve been using for years. What’s “funny” is that in almost all cases, their response is “well use this way instead” and it has turned out that there’s an equally old API that is still there that we can use instead. It also tells something about their documentation situation when that is such a common pattern. It’s never been possible to grasp this from just reading docs.

BoringSSL

BoringSSL has made great inroads in the market and is used on Android now and more. They don’t do releases(!) and have no version numbers so the only thing we can do is to build from git and there’s no install target in the makefile. There’s no docs for it, they remove APIs from OpenSSL (curl can’t support NTLM nor OCSP stapling when built with it), they’ve changed several data types in the API making it really hard to build curl without warnings. Funnily, they also introduced non-namespaced typedefs prefixed with X509_* that collide with other common headers.

How it can play out in real life

A while ago we noticed BoringSSL had removed the DES_set_odd_parity function which we use in curl. We changed the configure script to look for it and changed the code to survive without it. The lack of that function then also signaled that it wasn’t OpenSSL, it was BoringSSL

BoringSSL moved around things that caused our configure script to no longer detect it as “OpenSSL compliant” because CRYPTO_lock could no longer be found by configure. We changed it to instead search for HMAC_Init and we were fine again.

Time passed and BoringSSL brought back DES_set_odd_parity, so our configure script no longer saw it as BoringSSL (the Android fixed this problem in their git but never sent as the fix). We changed the configure script accordingly to properly use OPENSSL_IS_BORINGSSL instead to detect BoringSSL which was the correct thing anyway and now as a bonus it can thus detect and work with both new and old BoringSSL versions.

A short time after, I again try to build curl against the OpenSSL master branch only to realize they’ve deprecated HMAC_Init that we just recently switched to for detection (since the configure script needs to check for a particular named function within a library to really know that it has detected and can use said library). Sigh, we switched “detect function” again to HMAC_Update. Hopefully this exists in all three and will stick around for a while…

Right now I think we can detect and use all three. It is only a matter of time until one of them will ruin that and we will adapt again.

cURL and libcurl

libressl vs boringssl for curl

I tried to use two OpenSSL forks yesterday with curl. I built both from source first (of course, as I wanted the latest and greatest) an interesting thing in itself since both projects have modified the original build system so they’re now three different ways.

libressl 2.0.0 installed and built flawlessly with curl and I’ve pushed a change that shows LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL when doing curl -V etc.

boringssl didn’t compile from git until I had manually fixed a minor nit, and then it has no “make install” target at all so I had manually copy the libs and header files to a place suitable for curl’s configure to detect. Then the curl build failed because boringssl isn’t API compatiable with some of the really old DES stuff – code we use for NTLM. I asked Adam Langley about it and he told me that calling code using DES “needs a tweak” – but I haven’t yet walked down that road so I don’t know how much of a nuisance that actually is or isn’t.

Summary: as an openssl replacement, libressl wins this round over boringssl with 3 – 0.