RECENT BLOG NEWS

This post has been cross posted from Daniel Stenberg’s blog – originally posted here.

We have started the work on extending wolfSSL to provide the necessary API calls to power QUIC and HTTP/3 implementations!

Small, fast and FIPS

The TLS library known as wolfSSL is already very often a top choice when users are looking for a small and yet very fast TLS stack that supports all the latest protocol features; including TLS 1.3 support – open source with commercial support available.

As manufacturers of IoT devices and other systems with memory, CPU and footprint constraints are looking forward to following the Internet development and switching over to upcoming QUIC and HTTP/3 protocols, wolfSSL is here to help users take that step.

A QUIC reminder

In case you have forgot, here’s a schematic view of HTTPS stacks, old vs new. On the right side you can see HTTP/3, QUIC and the little TLS 1.3 box there within QUIC.

ngtcp2

There are no plans to write a full QUIC stack. There are already plenty of those. We’re talking about adjustments and extensions of the existing TLS library API set to make sure wolfSSL can be used as the TLS component in a QUIC stack.

One of the leading QUIC stacks and so far the only one I know of that does this, ngtcp2 is written to be TLS library agnostic and allows different TLS libraries to be plugged in as different backends. I believe it makes perfect sense to make such a plugin for wolfSSL to be a sensible step as soon as there’s code to try out.

A neat effect of that, would be that once wolfSSL works as a backend to ngtcp2, it should be possible to do full-fledged HTTP/3 transfers using curl powered by ngtcp2+wolfSSL. Contact us with other ideas for QUIC stacks you would like us to test wolfSSL with!

FIPS 140-2

We expect wolfSSL to be the first FIPS-based implementation to add support for QUIC. I hear this is valuable to a number of users.

When

This work begins now and this is just a blog post of our intentions. We and I will of course love to get your feedback on this and whatever else that is related. We’re also interested to get in touch with people and companies who want to be early testers of our implementation. You know where to find us!

I can promise you that the more interest we can sense to exist for this effort, the sooner we will see the first code to test out.

It seems likely that we’re not going to support any older TLS drafts for QUIC than draft-29.

wolfSSL offers commercial support packages and consulting for cURL and tiny-curl!

If you have any questions or run into any issues, contact us at facts@wolfssl.com, or call us at +1 425 245 8247.

wolfSSL and SYSGO are excited to announce our partner webinar: Security & Certifications for Critical Embedded Industries! 

wolfSSL and SYSGO have teamed up to integrate wolfSSL’s SSL/TLS crypto library into PikeOS real-time operating system (RTOS), which includes a type 1 hypervisor. With this integration, wolfSSL brings a FIPS crypto library to PikeOS’ certified Separation Kernel in a pre-integrated bundle that ensures robust, proven Security for your project’s architecture.

Join this webinar for a demo in which you can also see two instances of wolfMQTT: One subscriber as the input side, and a publisher as the output side, each utilizing a TLS connection. Learn about the benefits of utilizing the latest TLS 1.3 protocol, for which wolfSSL was the first commercial implementation.

Watch the webinar here: Security & Certifications for Critical Embedded Industries

About SYSGO

SYSGO, the European leader in real-time operating systems (RTOS) and hypervisors for certifiable embedded systems, and wolfSSL, the leading provider of TLS and cryptography, have announced that they joined forces to integrate wolfSSL security technology into SYSGO’s PikeOS real-time operating system (RTOS) that includes a separation kernel based type 1 hypervisor. As part of the cooperation, SYSGO will provide pre-integrated wolfSSL technologies into the development environment of PikeOS and its embedded Linux ELinOS product.

Find out more about our partner announcement here: https://www.sysgo.com/news-events/news-articles/article/sysgo-integrates-wolfssl-security-technologies-into-its-pikeos-real-time-operating-system

Are you new to wolfSSL?

wolfSSL focuses on providing lightweight and embedded security solutions with an emphasis on speed, size, portability, features, and standards compliance, such as FIPS 140-2 and 140-3, RTCA DO-178C level A certification, and support for MISRA-C capabilities. wolfSSL supports industry standards up to the current TLS 1.3 and DTLS 1.2, is up to 20 times smaller than OpenSSL, offers a simple API, an OpenSSL compatibility layer, is backed by the robust wolfCrypt cryptography library, and much more. Our products are open source, giving customers the freedom to look under the hood.

See you there!

Additional Resources 

In the meanwhile, check out the wolfSSL embedded SSL/TLS library, star us on Github, and learn more about the latest TLS 1.3 is available in wolfSSL.  

Contact Us 

If you have any questions or run into any issues, contact us at facts@wolfssl.com, or call us at +1 425 245 8247.

Check out this fantastic tutorial by Daniele Lacamera about wolfBoot and its TPM capabilities, hosted by our friends at TPM.dev! To watch the recording and slides from the presentation, check out the link below:

https://developers.tpm.dev/posts/wolfboot-with-tpm   

About wolfBoot 

wolfBoot is a portable, OS-agnostic, secure bootloader solution, relying on wolfCrypt for firmware authentication, providing firmware update mechanisms.

• Multi-slot partitioning of the flash device
• Integrity verification of the firmware image(s) using SHA2 or SHA3
• Authenticity verification of the firmware image(s) using wolfCrypt’s digital signature algorithms (ECDSA SECP256R1, Ed25519, RSA 2048/4096)
• Highly reliable, transport-agnostic firmware update mechanism
• Anti-rollback protection (via version numbering)
• Hardware-assisted dual-bank swapping
• Support for secure keystores, OTP memory, TPM 2.0
• Support for encrypted firmware images

To learn more: https://www.wolfssl.com/products/wolfboot/

To watch more videos and tutorials on wolfSSL products, check out our Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/wolfssl

Watch the Tutorial and Download the Slides: https://developers.tpm.dev/posts/wolfboot-with-tpm

If you have any questions or run into any issues, contact us at facts@wolfssl.com, or call us at +1 425 245 8247.

FIPS 140-2 requires the use of validated cryptography in the security systems implemented by federal agencies to protect sensitive information. The wolfCrypt Module is a comprehensive suite of FIPS Approved algorithms. All key sizes and modes have been implemented to allow flexibility and efficiency.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is sending FIPS cert #2425 into sunset June 2021. For customers who will be impacted, the wolfCrypt Cryptographic Module maintains its #3389 certificate and can be used in conjunction with the wolfSSL embedded SSL/TLS library for full TLS 1.3 client and server support. Upgrade your FIPS cert with wolfSSL to stay afloat and benefit from: 

• Algorithm support for TLS 1.3!
• New algorithms such as AES (CBC, GCM, CTR, ECB), CVL, Hash DRBG, DSA, DHE, ECDSA (key generation, sign, verify), HMAC, RSA (key generation, sign, verify), SHA-3, SHA-2, SHA-1, and Triple-DES
• Hardware encryption support for NXP’s Cryptographic Assistance and Assurance Module (CAAM), NXP Memory-Mapped Cryptographic Acceleration Unit (mmCAU), Intel’s AES-NI, and more
• Support for secure elements and TPM’s
• Interoperability with wolfBoot, wolfSSH, and wolfTPM
• Integration support for third party libraries such as strongswan, nginx, python and more

Contact us to upgrade to FIPS cert #3389 at fips@wolfssl.com. 

Additional Resources 

Learn more about wolfSSL support for FIPS cert #3389: https://www.wolfssl.com/wolfcrypt-fips-certificate-3389-3/ 

For a list of supported Operating Environments for wolfCrypt FIPS, check our FIPS page: https://www.wolfssl.com/license/fips/ 

Our FIPS Story

wolfSSL is currently the leader in embedded FIPS certificates. We have a long history in FIPS starting with wolfCrypt FIPS 140-2 Level 1 Certificate #2425 as well as wolfCrypt v4 FIPS 140-2 Level 1 Certificate #3389. wolfSSL partners with FIPS experts KeyPair to bring you FIPS consulting services, and high assurance along each step of your FIPS certification process. Additionally, wolfSSL will be the first implementation of FIPS 140-3. Stay tuned for an upcoming webinar on this topic. 

wolfSSL also provides support for a wolfCrypt FIPS Ready version of the library! wolfCrypt FIPS Ready is our FIPS enabled cryptography layer code included in the wolfSSL source tree that you can enable and build. You do not get a FIPS certificate, you are not FIPS approved, but you will be FIPS Ready. FIPS Ready means that you have included the FIPS code into your build and that you are operating according to the FIPS enforced best practices of default entry point, and power on self test.

wolfCrypt FIPS Ready can be downloaded from the wolfSSL download page located here: https://www.wolfssl.com/download/. More information on getting set up with wolfCrypt FIPS Ready can be found in our FIPS Ready User guide here: https://www.wolfssl.com/docs/fips-ready-user-guide/

If you have any questions or run into any issues, contact us at facts@wolfssl.com, or call us at +1 425 245 8247.

We are hosting a special webinar on the Network Security Required for Avionics Systems for our Japan audience on September 29th!  

Watch the webinar here : Security in Avionics 

About 

The avionics industry is currently moving to encourage avionics manufacturers to offer more interactive connectivity than ever before. The growing threat of cybersecurity attacks in communication systems is no exception in the avionics industry, and systems must be protected from these attacks.

To develop a secure system, you first need to define the required security level requirements. Often, these requirements fall to the relevant system level through a system-wide security assessment. As part of this process, you need a security plan that considers the entire product life cycle. Without a reliable safety foundation in the development life cycle, it is difficult to prove and maintain the safety of a product.

In this webinar, how will the architectural foundation of Deos, a Time & Space Partitioned RTOS that was certified as DO-178 Level A in 1998, and the cryptography and Deos provided by wolfSSL be integrated? Learn how to achieve the secure features that today’s avionics manufacturers need.

What an RTOS vendor needs to provide for safety and security: 

• · Deos as a foundation for a secure platform 
• · Secure Boot
• · Secure Update
• · Secure Transport
• · Cryptography (a building block for all of the above)

This webinar will be held in English.

Watch the webinar now. After registering, we will send you a confirmation email regarding your participation in the webinar.

We look forward to your participation.

If you have any questions or run into any issues, contact us at facts@wolfssl.com, or call us at +1 425 245 8247.

Please see here for other webinar schedules and the release of the on-demand version .

wolfSSL did an internal review of the Raccoon Attack, in addition to reaching out to the research team behind the report, to determine if wolfSSL users are affected by this attack.

The report pertains to the use of static DH cipher suites and the re-use of a DH key with DHE cipher suites. The wolfSSL internal review concluded that:

A) wolfSSL does not support static DH.  Conclusion – Not affected
B) wolfSSL ALWAYS generates a fresh key for every connection using DHE cipher suites with TLS 1.2 and lower protocol versions. (Special note: TLS 1.3 is not affected).  Conclusion – Not affected

wolfSSL also received feedback from the research team that DHE-PSK cipher suites suffer from an inherent specification flaw that can leak the “length” of the Pre Shared Key under certain circumstances. This is due to the way the Premaster Secret (PMS) is generated for DHE_PSK cipher suites. The PMS is generated from:

Length | PMS | Length | PSK

The above is hashed and the runtime is affected by the length of the PSK being used. Attackers can measure this runtime remotely by sending ClientKeyExchange messages and measuring the response times to determine the length of the PSK. This is covered in more detail in section 4.2 of the Raccoon Attack paper (link included above and in the Ref below). Long, regular sized PSK’s are typically used but if this is of concern in your application wolfSSL recommends that ECDHE_PSK cipher suites be used in preference to DHE_PSK cipher suites.

Certain weak projects that claim to be secure will not respond to this attack.  You should not use those products or projects because they will expose you. 

If you have any questions or run into any issues, contact us at facts@wolfssl.com, or call us at +1 425 245 8247.

This post has been cross posted from Daniel Stenberg’s blog – originally posted here.

You remember my tiny-curl effort to port libcurl to more Real-time operating systems? Back in May 2020 I announced it in association with me porting tiny-curl to FreeRTOS.

Today I’m happy to bring you the news that tiny-curl 7.72.0 was just released. Now it also builds and runs fine on the Micrium OS.

Timed with this release, I changed the tiny-curl version number to use the same as the curl release on which this is based on, and I’ve created a new dedicated section on the curl web site for tiny-curl:

https://curl.haxx.se/tiny/

Head over there to download.

Why tiny-curl

With tiny-curl you get an HTTPS-focused small library, that typically fits in 100Kb storage, needing less than 20Kb of dynamic memory to run (excluding TLS and regular libc needs).

You want to go with libcurl even in these tiny devices because your other options are all much much worse. Lots of devices in this category (I call it “devices that are too small to run Linux“) basically go with some default example HTTP code from the OS vendor or similar and sure, that can often be built into a much smaller foot-print than libcurl can but you also get something that is very fragile and error prone. With libcurl, and tiny-curl, instead you get:

• the same API on all systems – porting your app over now or later becomes a smooth ride
• a secure and safe library that’s been battle-proven, tested and checked a lot
• the best documented HTTP library in existence
• commercial support is readily available

tiny and upward

tiny-curl comes already customized as small as possible, but you always have the option to enable additional powers and by going up slightly in size you can also add more features from the regular libcurl plethora of powerful offerings.

If you have any questions or run into any issues, contact us at facts@wolfssl.com, or call us at +1 425 245 8247.

Storing encrypted firmware updates with wolfBoot

At wolfSSL, we work together with our customers to better understand the real-life scenarios in embedded security.

One of the concerns that we have been addressing the most when it comes to secure boot is the protection of the ‘data at rest’ when the firmware updates are received and stored on unprotected non-volatile memory supports, such as external SPI FLASH devices or other customized forms of storage.

wolfBoot, our fully open source secure bootloader solution for embedded systems, now supports encrypted external partitions, to safely store your firmware updates during the update process. The algorithm used is ChaCha20, implemented via wolfCrypt.

Each update can now be signed-and-encrypted to be distributed on the target, and the application can set a decrypt key at runtime, using wolfBoot API. This support has been recently merged in master branch and it will be included in the next release.

Here is how to enable it:

1. Compile the bootloader with the option `ENCRYPT=1`
2. Create a buffer of 44 random Bytes, and store it into a `secret_key` file. This file now contains the key and vector that will be used for the encryption of the firmware image.
3. Add the extra step `–encrypt secret_key` to the sign tool invocation. This will generate an extra *_signed_and_encrypted.bin image file
4. Transfer the _signed_and_encrypted image to the target. The system application can still use wolfBoot HAL to access external devices, because encryption is only enabled in bootloader mode.
5. Set the secret key and vector in the application via the wolfBoot API call `wolfBoot_set_encryption_key()`. The secret key could be e.g. pre-stored in a secure element, or transmitted during the update through a secure channel.
6. Initiate the update as usual, with `wolfBoot_trigger_update()`, and reboot. wolfBoot will attempt to decrypt and verify the firmware, and initiate the installation if the verification is successful.

The image stored in the UPDATE partition is always encrypted, including the backup copy of the previously running system during the installation. This ensures that reading out the partition would never reveal its content as long as the secret encryption key is kept safe.

The partition encryption support in wolfBoot is an additional protection for data at rest, when the firmware is stored on external devices where it is not possible to activate any effective read-out protection.

For data in motion, as usual, we recommend transferring the updates using TLS 1.3, and always using encrypted communication towards the firmware consumer device.

If you have any questions or run into any issues, contact us at facts@wolfssl.com, or call us at +1 425 245 8247.

At wolfSSL, we love our open-source community and fully support users working with us on our code, whether it’s finding errors or asking for technical assistance. We are always quick to address our security vulnerabilities–one recent example includes the article published by the Daily Swig on “Embedded security: wolfSSL can be abused to impersonate TLS 1.3 servers and manipulate communications” and our speedy response to the situation. 

As the Daily Swig narrates, Gérald Doussot, principal security consultant at UK-based cybersecurity firm NCC Group, discovered a high-risk bug in the SanityCheckTls13MsgReceived() function of file tls13.c:6925 that may put networks at risk of man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. NCC Group promptly alerted wolfSSL to the vulnerability in its eponymous, flagship product on July 27. 

And upon hearing the alert, we immediately addressed this issue. A fix was published on GitHub, then successfully tested by NCC Group, the next day. The patch was incorporated into the next major release, version 4.5.0, which landed on August 19.  The vulnerability (CVE-2020-24613) will affect versions up to 4.5.0 across all wolfSSL platforms that run TLS 1.3.

Additionally, our experts wolfSSL always urge users with TLS 1.3 enabled for client-side connections to update to the latest version, after a researcher demonstrated how attackers could use the open source library to impersonate TLS 1.3 servers, then read or modify data passed between clients. Additional sources state: 

“Users that have applications with client side code and have TLS 1.3 turned on, should update to the latest version of wolfSSL,” vendor in an accompanying GitHub advisory.

“Users that do not have TLS 1.3 turned on, or that are server side only, are NOT affected by this report.”

Version 4.5.0 of wolfSSL will assimilate fixes for five other vulnerabilities that may pose a risk of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, cache timing attacks, side-channel attacks, the leak of private keys, and clear application_data messages in epoch 0 being processed and returned to the application during the handshake. 

On the issue, our co-founder, Larry Stefonic stated, 

“It was not a tricky fix and we had the fix ready in about 36 hours after the report. [Additionally] Gerald was efficient and easy to work with in his bug submission. He wrote good examples that were easy to reproduce. We are appreciative of that. 

Despite having two sets of our internal eyeballs on each line of code, and sometimes three, we need people like Gerald who have the mindset and intellect to find these things.” 

So with all the bugs fixed and our newest updates released, we encourage people to continue to look at our code and break it. We look forward to hearing more feedback from our users! 

Read more: https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/embedded-security-wolfssl-can-be-abused-to-impersonate-tls-1-3-servers-and-manipulate-communications

New to wolfSSL? 

We are the best-tested crypto on the market and currently secure over 2 billion connections with more than 1,000 OEM customers and dozens of resellers.  Here at wolfSSL, we provide lightweight and embedded security solutions with an emphasis on speed, size, portability, features, and standards compliance. wolfSSL supports high security designs in the automotive (MISRA-C capabilities), avionics (complete RTCA DO-178C level A certification), and other industries.

For government consumers, wolfSSL has a strong history in FIPS 140-2, with upcoming FIPS 140-3 validation and Common Criteria support. wolfSSL supports industry standards up to the current TLS 1.3 and DTLS 1.3, is up to 20 times smaller than OpenSSL, offers a simple API, an OpenSSL compatibility layer, is backed by the robust wolfCrypt cryptography library, and much more.

Contact Us 

If you have any questions or run into any issues, contact us at facts@wolfssl.com, or call us at +1 425 245 8247.

Learn more about wolfSSL’s embedded SSL/TLS library, star us on Github, and check out the latest version of TLS 1.3 available with wolfSSL.