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Welcome to part four in our series of commonly-asked questions that we were asked at the 2011 RSA conference. In this post, we will be covering the following questions:

What does wolfSSL have as far as Certificate Management?
Is the yaSSL Embedded Web Server similar to Apache / mod_ssl?

Q:  What does wolfSSL have as far as Certificate Management?

wolfSSL includes support for x509 v3 Certificate Generation (Both self-signed and CA-signed). Certificate generation is turned off by default, but may be enabled during the ./configure process with the “–enable-certgen” build option. It may also be enabled by defining CYASSL_CERT_GEN in Windows or non-standard environments.

For a detailed explanation of how to use wolfSSL to create certificates, please see the wolfSSL Manual (Ch 9, Section XI), or Section XI of the wolfSSL Extensions Reference.

Apart from certificate generation, wolfSSL supports both PEM and DER certificates, and provides functions to convert between the two.

Q:  Is the yaSSL Embedded Web Server similar to Apache / mod_ssl?

The yaSSL Embedded Web Server and the Apache Web Server are similar in that it they are both web servers, but differ in their targeted environments. Although they have the same general categorization, they were built for very different purposes. Unlike Apache, the yaSSL Embedded Web Server was designed to be used in embedded environments – environments with very constrained resources.

Apache excels on desktop or enterprise platforms where performance is important but size or memory usage is negligible. Many embedded devices only require a simple web server for communication or displaying device status information. They require something small and fast, something that still offers desired features, and many times something that has support packages available. The yaSSL Embedded Web Server meets all of these requirements. For more information on the yaSSL Embedded Web Server, see the product page.

If you would like more information on our products, or have any questions or comments, please contact us at info@yassl.com.

As you know, yaSSL has partnered with Security Innovations to provide wolfSSL with NTRU cipher suites. Recently, Security Innovation and wolfSSL won the “Tomorrow’s Technology Today” award for Mobile Encryption. In addition, Security Innovation won the award for “Cryptography” for NTRU.

One of the advantages that NTRU offers is resistance to quantum attacks. Other public key operations such as RSA, DSA and ECC rely on a different mathematical algorithm, which with the advent of quantum computers, will be able to be broken by Shor’s Algorithm. NTRU’s abilities have been both published and reviewed by numerous scholarly journals and conferences.

In addition to being protected against quantum attacks, NTRU is much faster than RSA. When comparing the two ciphers at similar cryptographic strength, NTRU performs public key operations 100 to 200 times faster than RSA.

To read more about the awards, visit the respective links:
Mobile Encryption (http://www.infosecurityproductsguide.com/technology/2011/Security-Innovation.html)
Cryptography (http://www.infosecurityproductsguide.com/technology/2011/Security-Innovation-Cryptography.html)

If you are interested in learning more about wolfSSL with the NTRU cipher suites, or would like more information about our products, please email us at info@yassl.com.

We recently ran a benchmark on the yaSSL Embedded Web Server and wanted to share the results. Our benchmarking tool was Apache ab. To learn more about ab, you can reference Apache’s documentation page (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/programs/ab.html), or if it is installed on your system, look at the ab man page (man ab).

With a concurrency level of 2 and 100 SSL requests, we found that all 100 requests were serviced within 16 milliseconds, 80% being serviced within 6 ms.

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50%      5
66%      5
75%      5
80%      6
90%      9
95%     10
98%     15
99%     16
100%     16 (longest request)

With 100 SSL requests, a thread pool of 10, and a concurrency of 10, we saw that all requests were serviced within 33 ms:

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
 50%     18
 66%     19
 75%     20
 80%     20
 90%     22
 95%     24
 98%     33
 99%     33
100%     33 (longest request)

Our benchmark was executed on OS X running an Intel Core 2 Duo (2.4 GHz) with 4 GB of 800 MHz RAM. If you have any questions or comments about these benchmarks, or are looking for a different benchmark, please email us at info@yassl.com.

Welcome to part three in our series of commonly-asked questions that we were asked at the 2011 RSA conference. In this post, we will be covering the following questions:

Why is there a wolf in the yaSSL logo?
How does wolfSSL compare to OpenSSL?

Q:  Why is there a wolf in the yaSSL logo?

Why does a security company that focuses on embedded SSL products choose a wolf over any number of possible logo designs?  We chose a wolf to be part of our logo for several reasons:

• Wolves like to live in free and open environments.
• Wolves communicate and hunt in packs, like open source developers hunt bugs.
• Wolves are lean and fast.

Q:  How does wolfSSL compare to OpenSSL?

Many people are curious as to how wolfSSL compares to OpenSSL, and why we recommend migrating your current OpenSSL solution to wolfSSL.

• Size: With a 30-40k build size, wolfSSL can be up to 20 times smaller than OpenSSL. wolfSSL is a better choice for resource constrained environments.
• Standards Support: wolfSSL is up to date with the most current standards of TLS 1.2 with DTLS, which OpenSSL has yet to address.
• Streaming Media: wolfSSL is up to date with the best current ciphers and standards for streaming media support, including the HC-128 and RABBIT stream ciphers.
• Embedded Systems Support: wolfSSL is the leading SSL library for real time, mobile and embedded systems, by virtue of its breadth of platform support and successful implementations on embedded environments.
• License: wolfSSL is available under proper commercial licenses direct from Montana, or under the GPL, whereas OpenSSL is available only under their unique license from multiple sources.

If you have any additional questions on how we compare ourselves to OpenSSL, or you would like more information about our products, please contact info@yassl.com.

A new release of wolfSSL, 1.9.0, is now available.  This release adds bug fixes, improved TLSv1.2 through testing and better hash/sig algo ids, –enable-webServer for the yaSSL embedded web server, improper AES key setup detection, user cert verify callback improvements, and more.  More details can be found in the wolfSSL manual, which can be found in the doc/ directory or on our Documentation page, online.

The –enable-webServer build option provides an alternative to using –enable-opensslExtra. It enables a smaller and more portable build for users who are using it with the yaSSL Embedded Web Server.

If you have any questions or comments about the new release, or our products in general, please contact info@yassl.com.

See http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/android-threats-getting-steamy.  From the post:  “The aim of Android.Pjapps is to build a botnet controlled by a number of different Command and Control (C&C) servers. Among other things, it is able to install applications, navigate to websites, add bookmarks to your browser, send text messages, and optionally block text message responses.”

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.