Introduction

The wolfCrypt Provider (wolfProvider) is an OpenSSL provider for the wolfCrypt and wolfCrypt FIPS cryptography libraries. wolfProvider provides an OpenSSL provider implementation, as a shared or static library, to allow applications currently using OpenSSL to leverage wolfCrypt cryptography for FIPS and non-FIPS use cases.

wolfProvider is structured as a separate standalone library which links against wolfSSL (libwolfssl) and OpenSSL. wolfProvider implements and exposes an OpenSSL provider implementation which wraps the wolfCrypt native API internally. A high-level diagram of wolfProvider and how it relates to applications and OpenSSL is displayed below in Figure 1.

For more details on the design and architecture of wolfProvider see the wolfProvider Design chapter.

wolfProvider is compiled by default as a shared library called libwolfprov which can be dynamically registered at runtime by an application or OpenSSL through a config file. wolfProvider also provides an entry point for applications to load the provider when compiled in a static build.