OpenSSL 4.0 Beta Release Announcement

Mar 24, 2026

The OpenSSL Project is pleased to announce that OpenSSL 4.0 Beta1 pre-release is available, adding significant functionality to the OpenSSL Library.

OpenSSL 4.0.0 is a feature pre-release adding significant new functionality, bug fixes and mitigations:

• Removed extra leading ‘00:’ when printing key data such as an RSA modulus in hexadecimal format where the first (most significant) byte is >= 0x80.

• Standardized the width of hexadecimal dumps to 24 bytes for signatures (to stay within the 80 characters limit) and 16 bytes for everything else.

• Lower bounds checks are now enforced when using PKCS5_PBKDF2_HMAC API with FIPS provider.

• Added AKID verification checks when X509_V_FLAG_X509_STRICT is set.

• Augmented CRL verification process with several additional checks.

• libcrypto no longer cleans up globally allocated data via atexit().

• OPENSSL_cleanup() now runs in a global destructor, or not at all by default.

• ASN1_STRING has been made opaque.

• Signatures of numerous API functions, including those that are related to X509 processing, are changed to include const qualifiers for argument and return types, where suitable.

• Deprecated X509_cmp_time(), X509_cmp_current_time(), and X509_cmp_timeframe() in favor of X509_check_certificate_times().

• Removed support for the SSLv2 Client Hello.

• Removed support for SSLv3. SSLv3 has been deprecated since 2015, and OpenSSL had it disabled by default since version 1.1.0 (2016).

• Removed support for engines. The no-engine build option and the OPENSSL_NO_ENGINE macro are always present.

• Support of deprecated elliptic curves in TLS according to RFC 8422 was disabled at compile-time by default. To enable it, use the enable-tls-deprecated-ec configuration option.

• Support of explicit EC curves was disabled at compile-time by default. To enable it, use the enable-ec_explicit_curves configuration option.

• Removed c_rehash script tool. Use openssl rehash instead.

• Removed the deprecated msie-hack option from the openssl ca command.

• Removed BIO_f_reliable() implementation without replacement. It was broken since 3.0 release without any complaints.

• Removed deprecated functions ERR_get_state(), ERR_remove_state() and ERR_remove_thread_state(). The ERR_STATE object is now always opaque.

• Dropped darwin-i386{,-cc} and darwin-ppc{,64}{,-cc} targets from Configurations.

This release adds the following new features:

• Support for Encrypted Client Hello (ECH, RFC 9849). See doc/designs/ech-api.md for details.

• Support for RFC 8998, signature algorithm sm2sig_sm3, key exchange group curveSM2, and [tls-hybrid-sm2-mlkem] post-quantum group curveSM2MLKEM768.

• cSHAKE function support as per SP 800-185.

• “ML-DSA-MU” digest algorithm support.

• Support for SNMP KDF and SRTP KDF.

• FIPS self tests can now be deferred and run as needed when installing the FIPS module with the -defer_tests option of the openssl fipsinstall command.

• Support for using either static or dynamic VC runtime linkage on Windows.

• Support for negotiated FFDHE key exchange in TLS 1.2 in accordance with RFC 7919.

You can download the Alpha release from our download page or from the GitHub release page