Month: February 2011

To continue our series of commonly-asked questions which we were asked at the 2011 RSA conference, we will be answering the following questions:

Can you port wolfSSL to my platform?
If wolfSSL is open source, then how do you make money?

Q:  Can you port wolfSSL to my platform?

yaSSL offers a range of consulting services in order to help you optimize our products for your environment and project. One of the services we offer is the porting of our products (including wolfSSL) to new host languages and new operating environments.

We also provide feature additions (adding additional features you may need which are not currently in our products), and for those of you who are trying to move from an outdated or expensive SSL library, we offer a competitive upgrade program. You can read more about our consulting services on our About page, or by emailing us directly at info@yassl.com.

Q:  If wolfSSL is open source, then how do you make money?

We are strong believers in open source, and as such, make our products freely available under the GPLv2. As you may know, our products are dual licensed under both the GPLv2 and standard commercial licensing. We make money primarily from the following three areas:

– Commercial License Sales
– Support Packages
– Consulting Work

As always, if you have any questions or would like more information, please contact info@yassl.com.

If you’ve been following our blog, you know we are planning on answering some common questions that we were asked during the 2011 RSA Conference.  Today is the first post in this series.  The first questions we will be looking at are:

Does wolfSSL have sniffer, also known as SSL Inspection functionality?
What about resiliency in the TCP reassembly library?

Q:  Does wolfSSL have sniffer, also  know as SSL Inspection functionality?

Yes, wolfSSL has had SSL Inspection (sniffer) functionality since version 1.5.0.  We have provided a build option allowing the wolfSSL library to be built with this functionality.  This means you are able to collect SSL traffic packets and with the correct key file, are able to decrypt them as well.  This is useful for many reasons, some of which include:

– Analyzing Network Problems
– Detecting network misuse by internal and external users
– Monitoring network usage and data in motion
– Debugging client/server communications

To enable SSL Inspection (sniffer) support, build wolfSSL with the “–enable-sniffer” option on *nix or use the vcproj files on Windows. You will need to have pcap installed on *nix or WinPcap on Windows.  To learn more about functions provided and more detailed usage, please see either the wolfSSL Manual, or the “wolfSSL Additional Features” document.

Q:  What about resiliency in the TCP re-assembly library?

The wolfSSL TCP re-assembly library is currently functional, but not resilient.  This is something that several people have asked about, and something we are looking into.  If you have a need for a resilient TCP re-assembly library, or think this would be beneficial to your project, please let us know at info@yassl.com.

While at FOSDEM 2011, we had the opportunity to listen to Arnout Vandecappelle’s presentation titled “Creating secure web based user interfaces for Embedded Devices.” We really enjoyed it, and wanted to share it with our readers. You can read the abstract, taken from mind.be, below:

Abstract:

A web interface is the easiest way to add something GUI-ish to an embedded system. However, setting up an Apache and writing CGI scripts requires too much work and overburdens resource constrained systems.. This presentation shows you the best tools to simplify your life for adding an interface to your embedded system. The first step is the Mongoose Embedded Web Server. It is a tiny (40K) yet fully-featured web server that can be embedded directly in your application. Combining it with the efficient wolfSSL library gives you a secure environment. For a more advanced GUI, there is Wt, which completely removes the burden of web programming from you – you`ll hardly even notice there`s a web server in your application!

You can download Arnout’s presentation in both PDF and ODP formats from the mind.be publication page. We’ll also be linking to Arnout’s slides on our media page as well.

Link to mind.be publication page: http://mind.be/?page=publications
Direct link to PDF slides: http://mind.be/content/110206_Web-ui.pdf

wolfSSL+ (pronounced plus) is now available. wolfSSL+ includes NTRU public key encryption. NTRU works well in mobile environments because of the reduced bit size needed to provide the same security as other public key systems. NTRU also isn’t vulnerable to quantum attacks. Several new cipher suites utilizing NTRU are available including AES-256, RC4, and HC-128. Please contact us if you have any questions.

For everyone out there prototyping on the cool mbed board (http://mbed.org/), we`ve recently published our wolfSSL TLS/SSL embedded library to their cloud compiler so that developers can easily add it to their project.  It`s available at http://mbed.org/users/toddouska/libraries/wolfSSL/lm43pv .  We also have an example client you can try out at http://mbed.org/users/toddouska/programs/cyassl-client/lm394s .  Now securing connections, even during a prototype, is easily and rapidly attainable.  Please send us any comments or questions.

For those developers that prefer git, using GitHub, or just have to have the latest CyaSSL source code it’s now available on GitHub.  You can grab the latest sources from https://github.com/wolfSSL/wolfssl.git .  We’ve got all the source now there but we’re gradually moving away from sourceforge.  So we’re still in transition.  Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

The second release of the yaSSL Embedded Web Server is now available for download!  New features with this version include a source release, better documentation, examples, and new run-time options.  

Our Web Server is focused on being small, fast, and embeddable.  Features include CGI, SSI, IP restrictions, access and error log support, and SSL among others. The wolfSSL embedded SSL library can be used to secure ports with SSL, giving you a secure connection while maintaining small size and fast speed.  

On an embedded system you can expect to see the yaSSL Embedded Web Server with wolfSSL enabled to come in around 100kB total.  We offer commercial support, consulting, and licenses for use in a wide variety of projects.

If you have any questions, or would like to learn more about the yaSSL Embedded Web Server and how it can help your project, please contact info@yassl.com.