Tag Archives: WolfSSL

cURL and libcurl, wolfSSL

curl up 2019 is over

(I will update this blog post with more links to videos and PDFs to presentations as they get published, so come back later in case your favorite isn’t linked already.)

The third curl developers conference, curl up 2019, is how history. We gathered in the lovely Charles University in central Prague where we sat down in an excellent class room. After the HTTP symposium on the Friday, we spent the weekend to dive in deeper in protocols and curl details.

I started off the Saturday by The state of the curl project (youtube). An overview of how we’re doing right now in terms of stats, graphs and numbers from different aspects and then something about what we’ve done the last year and a quick look at what’s not do good and what we could work on going forward.

James Fuller took the next session and his Newbie guide to contributing to libcurl presentation. Things to consider and general best practices to that could make your first steps into the project more likely to be pleasant!

Long term curl hacker Dan Fandrich (also known as “Daniel two” out of the three Daniels we have among our top committers) followed up with Writing an effective curl test where the detailed what different tests we have in curl, what they’re for and a little about how to write such tests.

Sign seen at the curl up dinner reception Friday night

After that I was back behind the desk in the classroom that we used for this event and I talked The Deprecation of legacy crap (Youtube). How and why we are removing things, some things we are removing and will soon remove and finally a little explainer on our new concept and handling of “experimental” features.

Igor Chubin then explained his new protect for us: curlator: a framework for console services (Youtube). It’s a way and tooling that makes it easier to provide access to shell and console oriented services over the web, using curl.

Me again. Governance, money in the curl project and someone offering commercial support (Youtube) was a presentation about how we intend for the project to join a legal entity SFC, and a little about money we have, what to spend it on and how I feel it is good to keep the project separate from any commercial support ventures any of us might do!

While the list above might seems like more than enough, the day wasn’t over. Christian Schmitz also did his presentation on Using SSL root certificate from Mac/Windows.

Our local hero organizer James Fuller then spoiled us completely when we got around to have dinner at a monastery with beer brewing monks and excellent food. Good food, good company and curl related dinner subjects. That’s almost heaven defined!

Sunday

Daylight saving time morning and you could tell. I’m sure it was not at all related to the beers from the night before…

James Fuller fired off the day by talking to us about Curlpipe (github), a DSL for building http execution pipelines.

The class room we used for the curl up presentations and discussions during Saturday and Sunday.

Robin Marx then put in the next gear and entertained us another hour with a protocol deep dive titled HTTP/3 (QUIC): the details (slides). For me personally this was a exactly what I needed as Robin clearly has kept up with more details and specifics in the QUIC and HTTP/3 protocols specifications than I’ve managed and his talk help the rest of the room get at least little bit more in sync with current development.

Jakub Nesetril and Lukáš Linhart from Apiary then talked us through what they’re doing and thinking around web based APIs and how they and their customers use curl: Real World curl usage at Apiary.

Then I was up again and I got to explain to my fellow curl hackers about HTTP/3 in curl. Internal architecture, 3rd party libs and APIs.

Jakub Klímek explained to us in very clear terms about current and existing problems in his talk IRIs and IDNs: Problems of non-ASCII countries. Some of the problems involve curl and while most of them have their clear explanations, I think we have to lessons to learn from this: URLs are still as messy and undocumented as ever before and that we might have some issues to fix in this area in curl.

To bring my fellow up to speed on the details of the new API introduced the last year I then made a presentation called The new URL API.

Clearly overdoing it for a single weekend, I then got the honors of doing the last presentation of curl up 2019 and for an audience that were about to die from exhaustion I talked Internals. A walk-through of the architecture and what libcurl does when doing a transfer.

Summary

I ended up doing seven presentations during this single weekend. Not all of them stellar or delivered with elegance but I hope they were still valuable to some. I did not steal someone else’s time slot as I would gladly have given up time if we had other speakers wanted to say something. Let’s aim for more non-Daniel talkers next time!

A weekend like this is such a boost for inspiration, for morale and for my ego. All the friendly faces with the encouraging and appreciating comments will keep me going for a long time after this.

Thank you to our awesome and lovely event sponsors – shown in the curl up logo below! Without you, this sort of happening would not happen.

curl up 2020

I will of course want to see another curl up next year. There are no plans yet and we don’t know where to host. I think it is valuable to move it around but I think it is even more valuable that we have a friend on the ground in that particular city to help us out. Once this year’s event has sunken in properly and a month or two has passed, the case for and organization of next year’s conference will commence. Stay tuned, and if you want to help hosting us do let me know!


cURL and libcurl, wolfSSL

commercial curl support!

If you want commercial support, ports of curl to other operating systems or just instant help to fix your curl related problems, we’re here to help. Get in touch now! This is the premiere. This has not been offered by me or anyone else before.

I’m not sure I need to say it, but I personally have authored almost 60% of all commits in the curl source code during my more than twenty years in the project. I started the project, I’ve designed its architecture etc. There is simply no one around with my curl experience and knowledge of curl internals. You can’t buy better curl expertise.

curl has become one of the world’s most widely used software components and is the transfer engine doing a large chunk of all non-browser Internet transfers in the world today. curl has reached this level of success entirely without anyone offering commercial services around it. Still, not every company and product made out there has a team of curl experts and in this demanding time and age we know there are times when you rather hire the right team to help you out.

We are the curl experts that can help you and your team. Contact us for all and any support questions at support@wolfssl.com.

What about the curl project?

I’m heading into this new chapter of my life and the curl project with the full knowledge that this blurs the lines between my job and my spare time even more than before. But fear not!

The curl project is free and open and will remain independent of any commercial enterprise helping out customers. I realize me offering companies and organizations to deal with curl problems and solving curl issues for compensation creates new challenges and questions where boundaries go, if for nothing else for me personally. I still think this is worth pursuing and I’m sure we can figure out and handle whatever minor issues this can lead to.

My friends, the community, the users and harsh critiques on twitter will all help me stay true and honest. I know this. This should end up a plus for the curl project in general as well as for me personally. More focus, more work and more money involved in curl related activities should improve the project.

It is with great joy and excitement I take on this new step.

cURL and libcurl, Work

I’m on team wolfSSL

4 Comments

Let me start by saying thank you to all and everyone who sent me job offers or otherwise reached out with suggestions and interesting career moves. I received more than twenty different offers and almost every one of those were truly good options that I could have said yes to and still pulled home a good job. What a luxury challenge to have to select something from that! Publicly announcing me leaving Mozilla turned out a great ego-boost.

I took some time off to really reflect and contemplate on what I wanted from my next career step. What would the right next move be?

I love working on open source. Internet protocols, and transfers and doing libraries written in C are things considered pure fun for me. Can I get all that and yet keep working from home, not sacrifice my wage and perhaps integrate working on curl better in my day to day job?

I talked to different companies. Very interesting companies too, where I have friends and people who like me and who really wanted to get me working for them, but in the end there was one offer with a setup that stood out. One offer for which basically all check marks in my wish-list were checked.

wolfSSL

On February 5, 2019 I’m starting my new job at wolfSSL. My short and sweet period as unemployed is over and now it’s full steam ahead again! (Some members of my family have expressed that they haven’t really noticed any difference between me having a job and me not having a job as I spend all work days the same way nevertheless: in front of my computer.)

Starting now, we offer commercial curl support and various services for and around curl that companies and organizations previously really haven’t been able to get. Time I do not spend on curl related activities for paying customers I will spend on other networking libraries in the wolfSSL “portfolio”. I’m sure I will be able to keep busy.

I’ve met Larry at wolfSSL physically many times over the years and every year at FOSDEM I’ve made certain to say hello to my wolfSSL friends in their booth they’ve had there for years. They’re truly old-time friends.

wolfSSL is mostly a US-based company – I’m the only Swede on the team and the only one based in Sweden. My new colleagues all of course know just as well as you that I’m prevented from traveling to the US. All coming physical meetings with my work mates will happen in other countries.

commercial curl support!

We offer all sorts of commercial support for curl. I’ll post separately with more details around this.

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.