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yaSSL has made great progress 2011!  Company growth, active partnerships, technical improvements, and our community have all made great strides forward.  We are very happy with the results of 2011 and look forward to an exciting year in 2012!  Looking to 2012, we are planning ongoing improvements to our technology and have doubled our technical resources in order to better serve our users in 2012.  

Listed below is an overview of our progress in 2011.

Business and Company Progress

1.  We participated and/or exhibited in the following events: FOSDEM, ESC Silicon Valley, O`Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo, RSA Conference, Game Developers Conference, Infosecurity Europe, OSCON, ESC Boston, and the ARM Technology Conference

2.  We gave presentations at both FOSDEM 2011 (Lightning Talk) and the 2011 O`Reilly MySQL Conference (Securing MySQL with a Focus on SSL) and published an article in the Linux Journal (Installing an Alternate SSL Provider on Android). Our presentations can be found on our Media page.

3.  We made significant improvements to our documentation (including the wolfSSL Manual, wolfSSL API Reference, and SSL Tutorial) and to our website.

4.  Our customer base doubled in 2011 and we increased our revenues by 5X.

Meaningful progress with our partner community:

1.  ARM:  wolfSSL is now included in the ARM / Avnet Embedded Software Store (www.embeddedsoftwarestore.com).
2.  Intel:  Continued a successful partnership with Intel, along with becoming a general member of the Intel Embedded Alliance
3.  We added Security Innovation and SkypeKit as a new partners.
4.  We added KoanLogic as a new partner.

wolfSSL Technical Progress

Feature highlights from our five releases of the wolfSSL embedded SSL library in 2011 include:

1.  Added Elliptic Curve (ECC) cipher suites to wolfSSL
2.  Added support for ECC, EC-DSA, and EC-DH to our CTaoCrypt crypto library
3.  Better TLS 1.2 support through more comprehensive interoperability testing with other SSL implementations
4.  Added SHA256 cipher suites and certificate signatures
5.  Added PKCS8 private key encryption support
6.  Added Password based key derivation function 2 (PBKDF2)
7.  Added PKCS #12 PBKDF support as part of our plan to get to full PKCS12 support
8.  Included UID parsing for x509 certificates
9.  Included runtime memory hooks for users wanting to change memory functions at runtime
10.  Added runtime hooks for customizable logging ability
11.  Added compiler function visibility and better naming for less namespace pollution
12.  Created simpler header structure for users
13.  Added make test support
14.  CTaoCrypt runtime library detection ability
15.  Added AES counter (CTR) mode
16.  EDH on both client and server sides
17.  Made NTRU Cipher Suites available

yaSSL Embedded Web Server Progress

1.  Released version 0.2 with bug fixes and feature enhancements
1.  Improved documentation and examples

Porting Progress

1.  CURL port.  wolfSSL can now be built with CURL (as a build option).
2.  Mbed Release.  wolfSSL was ported to Mbed in late 2010 and is now available for the Mbed cloud compiler.
3.  KLone Web Application Framework.  wolfSSL is now ported to the KLone Web Application Framework by KoanLogic.
4.  memcached patch.  wolfSSL now provides SSL security for memcache.
5.  FreeRTOS support.  wolfSSL now supports FreeRTOS/OpenRTOS.
6.  Haiku OS.  wolfSSL now works with the Haiku Operating System.
7.  lwIP support.  wolfSSL now supports running on top of lwIP.
8.  Microchip pic32 support.  wolfSSL now supports running on the pic32.
9.  reSIPprocate port
10.  We now support wpa_supplicant as a compile time option.
11.  Added hostapd support
12.  Apple TV port:  wolfSSL and yasslEWS now can be run on the Apple TV.
13.  Added wolfSSL crypto provider to MIT Kerberos library.
14.  wolfSSL Android NDK package.  wolfSSL can now be used in Android NDK applications.
15.  Ported MIT Kerberos to Android using Google’s Android NDK.

Code & Community

1.  Migrated wolfSSL code to GitHub
2.  Introduced the yaSSL Support Forums
3.  Added BMX6 to the wolfSSL Community

We are looking forward to the upcoming year and sharing new features and technology improvements with our embedded SSL users and community.

Are you interested in using the yaSSL Embedded Web Server in your project or on your device but have discovered that it currently lacks support for your desired platform? yaSSL offers a porting service for the yaSSL Embedded Web Server for just this occasion.

If you are interested in having us port the yaSSL Embedded Web Server to your platform, please contact us at info@yassl.com for more information about cost and time estimates.

We receive a lot of questions about the origins of the CyaSSL and CTaoCrypt software packages.  We get asked where they were developed, and by who?  These questions usually come from US government agencies and their contractors.  Simply stated, mes amis, CyaSSL was Born in the USA and written by US citizens.

If you have any additional questions about the origins of the CyaSSL embedded SSL library, please contact us at info@yassl.com

Hi!  Would you be interested in wolfSSL ported into Dropbear? We have been thinking about putting wolfSSL into Dropbear SSH, and would like your feedback.  Contact us at info@yassl.com if you think wolfSSL should be ported into Dropbear.

Many of our users are curious about how the wolfSSL embedded SSL library will perform on a specific hardware device or in a specific environment. Because of the wide variety of different platforms and compilers used today in embedded, enterprise, and cloud-based environments, it is hard for us to give generic performance calculations across the board.

To help our users and customers in determining SSL performance for wolfSSL / CTaoCrypt, we provide a benchmark application which is bundled with wolfSSL. wolfSSL uses the CTaoCrypt cryptography library for all crypto operations by default. Because the underlying crypto is a very performance-critical aspect of SSL/TLS, our benchmark application runs performance tests on CTaoCrypt’s algorithms.

The benchmark utility is located in ctaocrypt/benchmark. Typical output may look like:

./ctaocrypt/benchmark/benchmark
AES 5 megs took 0.033 seconds, 149.84 MB/s
ARC4 5 megs took 0.017 seconds, 297.23 MB/s
HC128 5 megs took 0.004 seconds, 1185.10 MB/s
RABBIT 5 megs took 0.011 seconds, 453.14 MB/s
3DES 5 megs took 0.236 seconds, 21.18 MB/s

MD5 5 megs took 0.011 seconds, 444.13 MB/s
SHA 5 megs took 0.019 seconds, 261.73 MB/s
SHA-256 5 megs took 0.041 seconds, 122.98 MB/s
SHA-512 5 megs took 0.023 seconds, 213.44 MB/s

RSA 2048 encryption took 0.11 milliseconds, avg over 100 iterations
RSA 2048 decryption took 2.36 milliseconds, avg over 100 iterations
DH 2048 key generation 0.88 milliseconds, avg over 100 iterations
DH 2048 key agreement 0.92 milliseconds, avg over 100 iterations

This is especially useful for comparing the public key speed before and after changing the math library. You can test the results using the normal math library (./configure), the fastmath library (./configure –enable-fastmath), and the fasthugemath library (./configure –enable-fasthugemath).

As always, please contact info@yassl.com with any questions or comments.

Hi!  Team yaSSL has been considering the addition of the GOST block cipher to our wolfSSL embedded SSL library.  If you are unfamiliar with GOST, there is a great wikipedia article here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOST_(block_cipher).  If you think wolfSSL should include GOST, then let us know.  We appreciate your feedback.  Just contact us at info@yassl.com.

We`ve started implementing Galois/Counter Mode (GCM) into wolfSSL.  Specifically for use with AES and as a cipher suite for embedded SSL.  One of the benefits of GCM is its efficiency and its performance appears to be pretty good as well.  As an authenticated encryption algorithm it provides both integrity and confidentiality.  We expect to see it more widely adopted in the near future.  If you`re interested in testing AES with GCM or have any question or comments please let us know.

GCM (Wikipedia): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois/Counter_Mode

-Team yaSSL

A short time ago, we announced the unveiling of the online Embedded Software Store by ARM and Avnet (previous post). Since that time, there has been some feedback on the site itself and many bugs and errors have been fixed.

We wanted to point our readers to the wolfSSL product page on the Embedded Software Store, now that it has been updated. Do you have any feedback on the store itself or on the wolfSSL product page? Do you like the idea of having an online store for your embedded software needs?

wolfSSL Product Page (Embedded Software Store):
http://embeddedsoftwarestore.com/store/em/SearchCommand?storeId=500201&langId=-1&catalogId=500201&action=Product&R=5001841600038

We look forward to hearing your thoughts at info@yassl.com.

Thanks!
– yaSSL

Version 2.0.2 of the wolfSSL embedded SSL/TLS library has been released and is now available for download! The first final release of wolfSSL 2.0 after three release candidates provides users and customers with additional bug fixes and feature enhancements. Specifically, version 2.0.2 adds:

– Bug fixes
– CTaoCrypt Runtime library detection settings when directly using the crypto library
– Default certificate generation now uses SHAwRSA and adds SHA256wRSA generation
– All test certificates now use 2048-bit and SHA-1 for better modern browser support
– Direct AES block access and AES-CTR (counter) mode
– Microchip pic32 support

To download the open source, GPLv2-licensed version of wolfSSL 2.0.2, please visit our Download Page. If you have any questions or comments or would like more information on commercial versions of wolfSSL, please contact us at info@yassl.com.

For build instructions, a full feature list, API reference, and more, please see the wolfSSL Manual.

We`ve noticed a couple articles lately mentioning printers as potential attack vectors.  One is particularly disturbing in that not only is a network breach possible, as if that`s not bad enough, but cracked firmware could cause a printer to heat up enough to start a fire: http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/29/9076395-exclusive-millions-of-printers-open-to-devastating-hack-attack-researchers-say .  

An easy way to prevent attack vectors like these is to build in a secure firmware updater.  Of course we think the embedded SSL solution wolfSSL is a perfect fit for this job.  Several printer models already use wolfSSL to secure documents and resources on the network.  We`d like to assist and provide tools to printer vendors (or any device vendor really) to protect the firmware, preventing attacks against data, property, and even lives.  Let us know if you have any questions or comments or are interested in building/using tools for firmware protection.

Team yaSSL.