OpenSSH No Longer Has To Depend On OpenSSL

ConstantineM writes: "What has been planned for a long time now, prior to the infamous heartbleed fiasco of OpenSSL (which does not affect SSH at all), is now officially a reality — with the help of some recently adopted crypto from DJ Bernstein, OpenSSH now finally has a compile-time option to no longer depend on OpenSSL. `make OPENSSL=no` has now been introduced for a reduced configuration OpenSSH to be built without OpenSSL, which would leave you with no legacy SSH-1 baggage at all, and on the SSH-2 front with only AES-CTR and chacha20+poly1305 ciphers, ECDH/curve25519 key exchange and Ed25519 public keys."

Comments

Vetting the replacement libraries?

[mlts]

Now, here is the secondary question: How well vetted/audited will the replacement libraries end up? Disconnecting OpenSSH from OpenSSL does help isolate things, but it also means that there is twice the cryptographic code to sift through in order to ensure security.

I trust the OpenBSD developers and Theo, so IMHO, this is a net security gain.

Maybe for the lost ciphers, it might be good to implement LibreSSL?

Re:Nooooooooo

[lgw]

DJB is the worst kind of asshole too: he's almost always right. So you shouldn't just ignore him. Meh, justified arrogance still annoys.

Now, what we really need is a cage match between DJB and Theo de Raanter. I'd buy that on PPV!

Re:Good news! Now get it FIPS certified.

[DougOtto]

While your points are certainly valid, they do little to mitigate the need for FIPS when dealing with things like FBI CJIS data. Either you're in compliance or they disconnect you. It's sort of like arguing with a TSA agent; it'll make you feel a little better but it won't actually change anything.