> On Feb 19, 2016, at 3:31 AM, Matt Caswell <m...@openssl.org> wrote:

OK that made our support lines blow up so yes there is interest.

Disclaimer: I work for Thales but do not speak for Thales.

> So it seems that for chil there may possibly be some rare use (but even
> the most recent evidence is 4 years old). However the OpenSSL dev team
> do not have access to this hardware to maintain the engine and (as noted
> above) this is currently not building in 1.1.0.

I think (again, personal impression) that this is one of those sleeper 
integrations that a lot of people use but doesn’t get on the radar a whole lot. 
Using openssl is by far the easiest way to get the nShield HSM to do something 
with protected keys… as long as those are RSA keys.  Pair that with existing 
application integrations like Apache, OpenSSH, etc. I know of a number of 
customers and partners, none of whom I am at liberty to discuss (although they 
might speak up for themselves), who use OpenSSL with nShield for various 
applications.

So it’s not dead.  What it does, it does very well.  If anything, the lack of 
visible activity may indicate how easy CHIL is to use and support.

> In both cases I would like to remove these engines from 1.1.0. I'd like
> to hear from the community if there is any active use of these. One
> option if there is found to be some small scale use is to spin out the
> engine into a separately managed repo (as has happened recently with the
> GOST engine).
> 
> If I don't hear from anyone I will remove these.

Ehm.  Let’s talk about this.  As I noted above, a lot of our valued customers 
may depend on this even thought they might not know or may have forgotten about 
it.  From your October 28 commit (29e7a56d), it seems that what broke us was 
when the bn structure went opaque… I see only two lines in e_chil.c that depend 
on the internal structure of bn so that should be addressable.  We’d like to do 
some more things to this Engine, like more key types and, yes, those dynamic 
locks should go away, which requires some surgery to the stuff underneath but 
nothing major.  All the platforms we run on now have good locking.  And, Rich, 
I indeed have had those locks on my guilty conscience for all this time but not 
found any round tuits.

However, I’m intrigued by the notion of a PKCS#11 Engine in OpenSSL: it’s a 
standard (an OASIS standard now); it’s fairly fully featured; everyone in the 
industry supports it including Thales; and you can build a program that calls 
it without needing a vendor SDK, because there are standard headers and a well 
defined way to get to the entry points.  If we can come up with a way to pick a 
PKCS#11 slot and log into it that makes sense (e.g. not by poking PINs into a 
system wide config file etc.) then I think we’d have a winner.

What I would like to see though is for such a PKCS#11 Engine to be part of 
OpenSSL proper, so that our customers and everyone else’s don’t have to go hunt 
hither and yon for bits and bobs of software in order to make their hardware 
kit work with OpenSSL.  How would OpenSSL obtain a PKCS#11 Engine to include in 
its distribution?

Thanks,

S.

--
san...@temme.net              http://www.temme.net/sander/
PGP FP: BCD1 6D2C 8906 C48A 540E  253E 94D3 36A3 6D15 930A



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