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Comment by bananas | Hacker News Reader

I'd hope that I speak for the majority here when I say that OpenSSL has had its chance.

This is the beauty of open source, nothing more. We can take this and make it better.

Count the number of vulnerabilities in OpenSSL over the last few years, relative to the size of its code base. A single vulnerability, albeit bad this year, results in a fork and the attitude of "it had its chance."

LibreSSL inherits all of the undiscovered vulnerabilities in its huge code base. I hope your harsh criticism carries over to its code base once these flaws are discovered here too. That's the beauty of open source.

number ok known vulnerabilities you mean ?

The problem is that a security software brick is not satisfactory when it works, but when you can be sure there are no problems.

Given the very low quality of the code and the high amount of bloat, few people actually trust it. They have to trust third-parties and external certifications and the word on the street, and this is not enough for that kind of dependency.

>Count the number of vulnerabilities in OpenSSL over the last few years, relative to the size of its code base. A single vulnerability

You might want to take your own advice. There have been tons of vulnerabilities in openssl, not one.

>LibreSSL inherits all of the undiscovered vulnerabilities in its huge code base.

That would be why it is being gutted and audited. That's the whole point.

Quite frankly unless LibreSSL manages to raise more than 2000$ a year (what the OpenSSL fundation makes, apparently) I fail to see how they hope to avoid encountering the same kind of problems OpenSSL did (and still does). And given that the OpenBSD projects had to beg for donations to reach a 150k$ goal, if memory serves, I doubt they'll be able to sink a tremendous amount of money into LibreSSL.

If you can't pay people to work on the project full time, properly test and audit the code, sooner or later something will go wrong. And then we'll see people over here commenting along the lines of "my god those people are incompetent/irresponsible, they hope to get a free pass because it's free and open source, etc..."

Also, until I see a first release of the lib it's just marketing as far as I'm concerned, after all the OpenBSD foundation announced OpenCVS in 2004...

openbsd has a tremendously good track record with writing secure software, though. OpenSSH, anyone?

Well sure, OpenSSH is probably one of the most useful and versatile tools out there, there's no denying that it's a huge achievement.

That being said it's a program with mostly well defined use cases while OpenSSL is a library used in thousands of programs (including OpenSSH) on a variety of hardware and operating systems. The OpenBSD project naturally mostly cares about OpenBSD first and the rest second, which might be a bad thing if we end up with a multitude of forks each supporting a particular OS/architecture, increasing the chances of messing things up. After all, the latest big OpenSSH vulnerability was due to debian-specific patches...

Also, for what it's worth, sloccount tells me the latest snapshot of OpenSSH has about 90 thousand lines of code while OpenSSL has more than 360 thousand. It's a huge, huge library, forking and maintaining it is a tremendous undertaking, even compared to OpenSSH.

>the OpenBSD projects had to beg for donations to reach a 150k$ goal

Well, true, but I don't think that anyone know how badly they needed the money and the $150.000 was collected in three month.

OpenSSH have been around for a long time, without much funding really. OpenCVS was a bit of a dud though.

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