Re:One week of OpenSSL cleanup
by peterwwillis on Sunday April 20, 2014 @12:50PM
(#7617460)
The OpenBSD team just want to do it their own way, regardless of the practical value of creating single solutions that work everywhere. OpenSSL was a great idea back when there was no other open crypto library. But now amateur cryptographers are a dime a dozen and anyone can slap together something that just works for them and disregards others. Hence stripping out everything, changing APIs, and enforcing KNF. There's probably no security value to 90% of the changes; they just want conformity to their personal style.
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As feld, clarry, danrik, etc. have pointed out, having a consistent coding style makes identifying bugs much easier.
"regardless of the practical value of creating single solutions that work everywhere"
Since these are the same folks who do OpenSSH, I would imagine after the initial work is done, it will probably evolve to be as portable as OpenSSH and the other OpenBSD projects.
Also, they are doing many bug fixes as shown on http://opensslrampage.org
The API's aren't changing... they are keeping API compat. Sure you won't be able to change the PRNG anymore ... but that isn't that big of a deal.
This isn't about confirming to their personal style, this is about cleaning the code up so that auditing it is possible.