Re: OpenSSL 3.0 for 14.0-RELEASE: issues with 1.x/3.x symbol clashing, ports linking against base OpenSSL, ports that don't compile/link against OpenSSL 3, etc

From: Enji Cooper <yaneurabeya_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 04 May 2023 03:38:00 UTC
> On May 3, 2023, at 4:54 PM, John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> 
> On 5/3/23 4:02 PM, Pierre Pronchery wrote:
>> 		Hi everyone,
>> On 5/2/23 23:24, John Baldwin wrote:
>>> On 5/2/23 2:59 AM, Antoine Brodin wrote:
>>>> On Tue, May 2, 2023 at 1:55 AM Enji Cooper <yaneurabeya@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Hello,
>>>>> One of the must-haves for 14.0-RELEASE is the introduction of OpenSSL
>>>>> 3.0 into the base system. This is a must because, in short, OpenSSL
>>>>> 1.1 is no longer supported as of 09/26/2023 [1].
>>>>> 
>>>>> I am proposing OpenSSL be made private along with all dependent
>>>>> libraries, for the following reasons:
>>>>> 1. More than a handful of core ports, e.g., security/py-cryptography
>>>>> [2] [3], still do not support OpenSSL 3.0.
>>>>> i. If other dependent ports (like lang/python38, etc) move to OpenSSL
>>>>> 3, the distributed modules would break on load due to clashing
>>>>> symbols if the right mix of modules were dlopen’ed in a specific
>>>>> order (importing ssl, then importing hazmat’s crypto would fail).
>>>>> ii. Such ports should be deprecated/marked broken as I’ve recommended
>>>>> on the 3.0 exp-run PR [4].
>>>>> 2. OpenSSL 1.1 and 3.0 have clashing symbols, which makes linking in
>>>>> both libraries at runtime impossible without resorting to a number of
>>>>> linker tricks hiding the namespaces using symbol prefixing of public
>>>>> symbols, etc.
>>>>> 
>>>>> The libraries which would need to be made private are as follows:
>>>>> - kerberos
>>>>> - libarchive
>>>>> - libbsnmp
>>>>> - libfetch [5]
>>>>> - libgeli
>>>>> - libldns
>>>>> - libmp
>>>>> - libradius
>>>>> - libunbound
>>>> 
>>>> In my opinion this is a huge amount of work a few weeks before the
>>>> release.  Focusing on updating OpenSSL and those core ports may be
>>>> simpler.
>>> 
>>> This is my view.  I think making OpenSSL private is a very huge task, and
>>> fraught with peril in ways that haven't been thought about yet (e.g. PAM)
>>> and that we can't hold up OpenSSL 3 while we wait for this.  Instead, I
>>> think
>>> we need to be moving forward with OpenSSL 3 in base as-is.  We will have to
>>> fix ports to work with OpenSSL 3 regardless (though this does make that
>>> pain
>>> in ports happen sooner).  Moving libraries private can happen orthogonally
>>> with getting base to work with OpensSL 3.
>> I have started to look at updating OpenSSL to version 3.0.8 in base,
>> using the existing vendor/openssl-3.0 branch.
>> My progress can be found at
>> https://github.com/khorben/freebsd-src/tree/khorben/openssl-3.0. I
>> regularly force-push to keep a consistent and nice commit history,
>> before possibly applying for a merge.
>> So far the status is:
>> - libssl, libcrypto build on amd64, i386, less sure about aarch64, other
>> architectures not tested
>> - libfetch builds, uses libmd in addition to OpenSSL
>> - libradius builds, same thing
>> - libarchive builds
>> - libunbound builds, but not unbound
>> - libmp builds
>> I used libmd to reach a buildable status faster, since the equivalent
>> MD5_*() API is now deprecated in OpenSSL 3. If MD5 is still allowed in
>> OpenSSL 3, we can avoid the dependency on libmd again. (anyone got
>> sample code for this?)
> 
> You can use the EVP_* API if desired.  tools/cryto/cryptocheck.c has examples
> of using the EVP_* APIs for both "plain" hashes and HMAC constructions

I'll echo this as well. This is what the library maintainers recommend for crypto primitive algorithm “agility”.
Cheers,
-Enji