Make you wonder what they've been testing this on. Even NetBSD doesn't have a recent release for Itanium. Crazy that you can run NetBSD 11.0 on HPPA, but not Itanium, given that HPPA is in some sense the pre-cursor to Itanium.
I kinda wonder what if Microsoft (or any major software company) would give their engineers a few decades of time just to refactor their existing systems, opposite of piling on new features. Will it result a much cleaner code, better architect, and stable product?
The last Windows I daily use was Windows 7 Home (same era with Windows Server 2008). The newer ones don't really improved much featurely from my (user) point of view, and from what I've heard, it's getting more sloppyer every newer version.
> what if Microsoft would give their engineers a few decades of time just to refactor their existing systems
They wouldn't, even if they didn't care about shipping new features. The technical complexity inside Windows/Office/old core MS offerings arises only in small part from ordinary tech debt--that is, things fixable without changing observable behavior. The lion's share of that complexity is because of Microsoft's priority to avoid breaking compatibility (backwards, or with hardware/software combos that work) at all costs.
That means that a refactor-only decade would achieve little unless that compatibility priority were changed.
The Windows user-mode innards have been significantly refactored. Many of the core system DLLs that apps link to are just redirects to the actual implementation now. Much of the jank seems to be in the UI.
It's just as likely it would end up as an overengineered mess. And that's without considering backwards compatibility constraints, which are one of the biggest maintenance burdens.
It has improved significantly since the early days of 3.0. Not back to 1.1.1 levels of performance, but enough that it's probably not a dealbreaker for most people.
To put that in perspective: I noticed that private key parsing was 70 times slower in early 3.x versions. I think it's only 8 times slower in current versions. That's still... a lot slower. For no good reason.
There were massive improvements to performance in some of the areas criticized by PyCA and haproxy. X.509 handling will also be faster in the average case, with more improvements planned for 4.2.
I looked into this and was tempted as there is less read locking and better RNG performance but they stripped the SSL_get1_curves() API which I depend on for bot detection plus I would have to recompile nginx and all its modules everywhere so in the end it was not tempting enough for me. Perhaps I am just lazier in my older age.
We ran a number of tests, including sending a percentage of real traffic to endpoints running AWS-LC and Wolfssl. Technically yes, OpenSSL 3.X is slow, measurably so, but not enough that we wanted to deal with it. That's for our use case, I can easily imagine there being others, where maybe you have different hardware or way more traffic, where it would be worth while. For basic TLS termination in haproxy, it wasn't really worth it to us.
>We do not fully understand the motivations that led to the public APIs and internal complexity we’ve described here. We’ve done our best to reverse engineer them by asking “what would motivate someone to do this” and often we’ve found ourselves coming up short.
Surely they thought of it but didn't say it out loud... to keep it exploitable, maybe?
Never attribute to malice what can sufficiently be explained by the love of software developers for overengineering and complexity.
Seriously, I have no trouble explaining this. Overengineering is just how many people think software development works. It's unfortunate, it causes plenty of problems, but it's not a sign of malicious intent.
No, that's not what's being implied. They're just saying they don't understand why OpenSSL has added so many indirections to otherwise straightforward operations.
Source: I am friends with the maintainers who wrote this and was one of the people who reviewed it in draft form.
Unnecessarily complicated APIs are a security code smell precisely because they help hide bugs, leaky abstractions, insecure state, and other exploitable issues.
There are two different things here: there’s code that is vulnerable because of unnecessary complexity, and there is imputing malice or an intent to hide exploitability through complexity. OpenSSL exhibits the former, not the latter.
The OpenBSD folks came to the exact opposite conclusion after auditing the code:
"In a nutshell, This was a very effective exploit mitigation technique countermeasure. It could not have been designed better to make an attack like heartbleed both hard to detect and have dire consequences. OpenBSD's memory allocator, Valgrind, and Coverity do not notice the memory issues."
Further, known exploits like the one crafted for XZ take advantage of plausible deniability and trust in contributors at every opportunity. Meaning that even if you wanted to disclaim malice, you cannot do so effectively.
They don’t appear to, at least not in my reading. “It could not have been designed better” reads more like an indictment of quality than an accusation of malfeasance.
The chosen phrasing is literally one step short of accusing the author of intent. "It could not have been designed better to [avoid detection] and cause harm" leaves open the possibility of accident, in the way that saying "this guillotine could not have been designed better to chop heads" leaves open the possibility of one spontaneously assembling from raw materials.
tangential, but I've always wondered what the point of these random pictures of a lock, gears, or unrelated little voxel art are for? Pre-LLMs, they were often hit or miss in terms of how much they added depending on if they were a random stock image or something someone drew.
But now, with LLMs, they're more available to customize, and it seems like people aren't actually thinking anymore about why they should be there. I think I'm implicitly biasing against the rest of the content in articles which have them as a result, since it's probably a sign of some level of lack of care/thought.
Guys, after this week, can we make sure to have more details in the title? Like "Look! Cool new OpenSSL features" so we're not PTSD'ing our way into release notes expecting it to say something about patching critical CVEs?
> Support for DTLS 1.3 (RFC 9147).
Refer to the ossl-guide-dtlsv13(7) manual page for details.
DTLS 1.3 is a huge improvement over 1.2 for efficiency and simplicity. I can’t speak to the OpenSSL implementation but it’s great that support is finally released.
Interesting they're adding new support for DTLS 1.3 when afaict most new applications are defaulting to QUIC datagram mode. I have something built around DTLS 1.3 and am using wolfssl for that reason, will have to check this out.
What a throwback. afaik Windows Server 2008 R2 had Itanium updates until 2020 and paid support until this year. Pretty good run to say at least
The last Windows I daily use was Windows 7 Home (same era with Windows Server 2008). The newer ones don't really improved much featurely from my (user) point of view, and from what I've heard, it's getting more sloppyer every newer version.
They wouldn't, even if they didn't care about shipping new features. The technical complexity inside Windows/Office/old core MS offerings arises only in small part from ordinary tech debt--that is, things fixable without changing observable behavior. The lion's share of that complexity is because of Microsoft's priority to avoid breaking compatibility (backwards, or with hardware/software combos that work) at all costs.
That means that a refactor-only decade would achieve little unless that compatibility priority were changed.
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/c69b5af10a754051274e...
“ The executable format that works on HPE Nonstop Compute's OSS is ELF64-bit, Big_Endian, X86_64. ”
https://inbox.sourceware.org/gcc-help/AM7PR02MB6483A12F6B98D...
Context: https://cryptography.io/en/latest/statements/state-of-openss...
Still a shame that it went backwards.
See https://openssl2026.sched.com/event/2VSQR/performance-the-li... and its slides https://2026.openssl-conference.org/slides/2026-d3-1400-perf.... Recording should also be available soon-ish.
Surely they thought of it but didn't say it out loud... to keep it exploitable, maybe?
Seriously, I have no trouble explaining this. Overengineering is just how many people think software development works. It's unfortunate, it causes plenty of problems, but it's not a sign of malicious intent.
Source: I am friends with the maintainers who wrote this and was one of the people who reviewed it in draft form.
and when asked to explain you responded with: "Didn't they say it already?"
Which any reader can verify they have not at the time of 1:42pm EST Oct 23 2026.
The OpenBSD folks came to the exact opposite conclusion after auditing the code:
"In a nutshell, This was a very effective exploit mitigation technique countermeasure. It could not have been designed better to make an attack like heartbleed both hard to detect and have dire consequences. OpenBSD's memory allocator, Valgrind, and Coverity do not notice the memory issues."
https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl/mgp00007.ht...
Just a single damning slide among many here: https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl/
More here: https://www.libressl.org/papers.html
Further, known exploits like the one crafted for XZ take advantage of plausible deniability and trust in contributors at every opportunity. Meaning that even if you wanted to disclaim malice, you cannot do so effectively.
But now, with LLMs, they're more available to customize, and it seems like people aren't actually thinking anymore about why they should be there. I think I'm implicitly biasing against the rest of the content in articles which have them as a result, since it's probably a sign of some level of lack of care/thought.
DTLS 1.3 is a huge improvement over 1.2 for efficiency and simplicity. I can’t speak to the OpenSSL implementation but it’s great that support is finally released.
I've been linking a lot of stuff against boringssl during that time, I suppose...
0. https://www.libressl.org/
A sad day. End of an era *salute*
i think a project like this would slough old architecture like mad and let major versions tick, but they forge on...
(Not a strange question given the recent PHP vulns found by AI.)