[erlang-questions] Erlang/OTP and OpenSSL 1.1

Sergei Golovan sgolovan@REDACTED
Sun Sep 18 18:00:13 CEST 2016


Hi!

Recently, new major OpenSSL version 1.1 has been released, with many
API incompatibilities, and I guess sooner or later one should port
Erlang crypto module to it. My first attempt of the porting can be
found at https://github.com/sgolovan/otp/tree/openssl11

There are a few things that have to be changed:

1. Basically every complex type in libssl became opaque, so one can't
put a variable on a stack (you can't have 'EVP_MD_CTX ctx' anymore)
and can't use the struct fields directly. So, I had to add code which
allocates these variables on a heap, and code which frees the
resources after use.

2. Quite a few constructors and destructors were renamed to maintain
names consistency (e.g. EVP_MD_CTX_new() instead of
EVP_MD_CTX_create(), EVP_MD_CTX_free() instead of
EVP_MD_CTX_destroy()), so I had to add quite a few #if's for old and
new calls.

3. OpenSSL documentation now says that there's no need in specifying
locking callbacks (actually it just doesn't say that one has to
specify them and doesn't provide the way to). Old functions like
CRYPTO_set_locking_callback(), CRYPTO_set_id_callback() became macros
which expand to nothing. So, I've added a preprocessor guards to
switch them off for 1.1.

4. New libssl implements chacha20-poly1305 cipher (there's no need in
patching anymore), so I've reimplemented the encryption/decryption
with this cipher using the libssl uniform interface. The problem with
it is that it implements RFC 7539
(https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7539) which differs to the current
implementation (a draft from
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-agl-tls-chacha20poly1305-04 ) in two
ways: first, the nonce size is changed from 8 to 12 bytes (8 bytes is
still acceptable, it shifts left by 32 bits), which isn't too bad
because the discrepancies can be found only after 32-bit block counter
overflows (which isn't very plausible). Second, the tag calculation
algorithm has been changed (see
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-agl-tls-chacha20poly1305-04#page-8
vs https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7539#page-19 ). This means that the
implementations aren't compatible. As for now I've added two test
cases for the new implementation (and haven't removed the old case, so
the test fails at the moment). I'd say that the old implementation
should be dropped some time.

Okay then. I hope this porting attempt will be helpful.

Cheers!
-- 
Sergei Golovan



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