The OpenSSL community is a diverse group, ranging from those that use
applications that depend on OpenSSL (effectively end-users) to operating system
distributions, application developers, embedded devices, layered security
libraries, and cryptographic algorithm and protocol researchers. Each of these
subsets of our community have different needs and different priorities.
The OpenSSL Technical Committee decided to have a more formal but also a more
open process on establishing changes to OpenSSL technical policies and
other technical decisions made by the OpenSSL Technical Committee. We would
like to invite the broad community of OpenSSL developers and users to
participate in our decision making process.
Following on from the recent announcement
that OpenSSL 3.0 has been released, we have now also submitted our FIPS 140-2
validation report to NIST’s Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP).
The currently recommended certificate chain as presented to Let’s Encrypt ACME
clients when new certificates are issued contains an intermediate certificate
(ISRG Root X1) that is signed by an old DST Root CA X3 certificate that expires
on 2021-09-30. In some cases the OpenSSL 1.0.2 version will regard the
certificates issued by the Let’s Encrypt CA as having an expired trust chain.
After 3 years of development work, 17 alpha releases, 2 beta releases, over
7,500 commits and contributions from over 350 different authors we have finally
released OpenSSL 3.0! In addition to this there has been a large number of
contributions from our users who have been actively working with the pre-release
versions to test it, make sure it works in the real world and with a large array
of different applications and reporting their results. I am also delighted to
note that there has been a 94% increase in the amount of documentation that we
have since OpenSSL 1.1.1 and an (adjusted) increase in the “lines of code” in
our tests of 54%. There has never been a better demonstration of what an active
and enthusiastic community we have than when you look at the statistics for the
OpenSSL 3.0 development work. Thanks to everyone who has taken part - no matter
how small that part was.
The OpenSSL Management Committee (OMC) and the OpenSSL Technical Committee
(OTC) are glad to announce our first beta release of OpenSSL 3.0. We consider
this to be a release candidate and as such encourage all OpenSSL users to build
and test against this beta release and provide feedback.