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Comment by icefo | Hacker News Reader

This made me think of BoringSSL and LibreSSL again.

Looking up on Wikipedia it seems that LibreSSL is focused on OpenBSD and removed lots of legacy code. BoringSSL (Google) got renamed to Tink but I couldn't not find much more.

It's sad to see that duplication of effort but it's also the force of open source

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OpenSSL recently changed licenses to Apache 2.0, which is a unacceptable in some of the BSDs, which made the LibreSSL fork more valuable from a licensing perspective for them.

Tink isn't really a rename, but an API wrapper to prevent misuse that happens to use BoringSSL internally.

BoringSSL is still alive, Tink is something completely separate.

Google Tink is an encryption library providing a high level API for common cryptography problems. Such as authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD). In a similar vein to libsodium, it's designed to not let you shoot yourself.

OpenSSL and it's forks expose the primitives directly, but as is the usual advice, don't roll your own crypto and say "We're using RSA 2048" because you copied an example from stack overflow without padding.

The paper points to data showing that OpenSSL is still the dominant SSL implementation on the net, so it's the one that matters.

If Windows is the dominant desktop computing platform, is it the only one the matters?

> It's sad to see that duplication of effort but it's also the force of open source

How's that a FOSS thing? Do you think there would be fewer TLS implementations running around if they were proprietary?

IIUC the point was that the ability to fork projects (and then potentially merge back) is one of the strengths of OSS, even if it means some duplicated effort.

The duplicated effort is needed. The OpenSSLs mono-cultur was one of the reason Heartbleed, and other OpenSSL security issues, where such huge problems and affected so many.

there is also https://www.wolfssl.com/

https://bearssl.org/ is kinda cool too.

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