Goodbye OpenSSL, and Hello To Google Tink

Which program has never reached Version 1.2, but is used as a core of security on the Internet? OpenSSL.

OpenSSL has caused so many problems in the industry including the most severe with Heartbleed. The problem with it is that it has been cobbled together and maintained on a shoe-string budget. Google, though, have been driving cryptography standards, and especially for the adoption of HTTPs.

And so Google have released Tink which is a multi-language, cross-platform cryptographic library. With OpenSSL we have complex bindings and which were often focused on specific systems, such as for DLLs in Windows systems. Tink is open-source and focuses on creating simple APIs and which should make the infrastructure more portable.

To overcome the problems caused by OpenSSL, Amazon too created their own stack: s2n (signal to noise), with a core focus on improving TLS (Transport Layer Security) and using a lighter weight approach. This follows Google’s release of BoringSSL and OpenBSD’s LibreSSL (and which were forks from OpenSSL). Each have defined smaller and more stripped down versions that implement the basic functionality of SSL/TLS. Overall s2n uses only 6,000…