[openssl-users] Manual Shutdown of OpenSSL 1.1.x library

[Matt Caswell]

On 11/10/18 21:56, Dan Heinz wrote:
> Is there currently a way to manually shutdown the OpenSSL library?
> 
> 
> 
> We have a DLL that statically links OpenSSL.  Our DLL gets loaded and
> unloaded multiple times by a process (not our process), and we need
> to release OpenSSL each time.  This was not possible with OpenSSL 1.1
> as of September 2017 as the process's atexit is where it gets
> released which will not be called after a FreeLibrary() call on our
> DLL.  Has this been revisited?  If there now a way to manually
> release OpenSSL, or are there any plans to add this ability?
> 
> 
> 
> Here is a link to our original post and discussion from January
> 2017:
> 
> https://www.mail-archive.com/openssl-users@openssl.org/msg80781.html
> 
> 
> 
> From the previous post, something like this would address the issue:
> "I'm wondering whether an option to override the default behavior
> might be possible, e.g. an explicit call to OPENSSL_init_crypto()
> with something like an OPENSSL_INIT_NO_ATEXIT_CLEANUP option. The
> application would then have to call OPENSSL_cleanup() explicitly."

No such option exists for currently supported OpenSSL versions. It could
be added to a future version fairly simply:

https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/7388

Matt