[openssl-users] [openssl-1.0.2d] default SSL handshake fails

[Jakob Bohm]

On 31-07-2015 23:06, Viktor Dukhovni wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 08:47:45PM +0000, Felix Almeida wrote:
>
>> I've tested other OpenSSL versions and everything goes well up to version
>> 1.0.1o, starting from 1.0.2 I see this handshake error.
> It seems you're posting follow-ups without checking whether your
> original post was answered.
>
>> I also tried to disable TLS on 1.0.2d by passing "no-tls" to the config
>> script, but this broke the building process (make stopped with an error).
>> So I believe I will stick with version 1.0.1o for now. :-\
> Or configure a cipherlist more compatible with a long obsolete and
> no longer supported Windows 2003 TLS stack.
>
The Windows 2003 TLS stack became unsupported for most
(but /not all/) users less than 20 days ago.  Treating
it as marginal and not as something that any core
networking library needs to be compatible (even *tested*
with) out of the box is another symptom of the useless
attitudes that permeate the new OpenSSL leadership.

The old OpenSSL project belonged to the long standing
tradition of making sure that Internet software needs to
work with the quirks of anything it could reasonably
encounter on any real world network, including both the
Internet, the US military networks (which have allegedly
paid a boatload of money for continued Win2003 support)
and any closed site networks that reuse Internet protocols
for their internal operations.

It would have been a serious brown bag moment for the old
maintainers to discover this in a release made that close
to (if not even overlapping) the vendor support period for
such a widely deployed system.  There is a lot of utility
software which is linked to OpenSSL libraries with very
little user configurability and which is simply expected
to "just work" when transferring data off a (not so) old
Windows computer.

The old team would have gone out of their way to make sure
the standard OpenSSL code would generate backward compatible
hello records by default, e.g. by ensuring that the
strongest enabled Win 5.x compatible cipher was within the
first 64 ciphers if that is indeed the technical solution.

Such real world quality issues are much more important than
making sure broken test tools don't complain that code to
prevent accidental heap corruption is not being called by
the current test suite because the relevant coding errors
have not yet happened.

OpenSSL is supposed to make sure that practical tools such
as wget, curl, fetchmail etc. etc. can talk to almost any
old SSL/TLS implementation that might be found in a dusty
basement or on an old backup tape somewhere.  Talking to an
old Netscape Navigator 3.x or a clunky old printer should
have a high chance of working, while talking to anything
popular that was up to date with official security updates
less than 2 years ago (let alone a month) is a simple must.

Enjoy

Jakob
-- 
Jakob Bohm, CIO, Partner, WiseMo A/S.  http://www.wisemo.com
Transformervej 29, 2860 Soborg, Denmark.  Direct +45 31 13 16 10
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