Official portable version of LibreSSL
LibreSSL is a fork of OpenSSL 1.0.1g developed by the OpenBSD project. Our goal is to modernize the codebase, improve security, and apply best practice development processes from OpenBSD.
LibreSSL provides much of the OpenSSL 1.1 API. The OpenSSL 3 API is not currently supported. Incompatibilities between the projects exist and are unavoidable since both evolve with different goals and priorities. Important incompatibilities will be addressed if possible and as long as they are not too detrimental to LibreSSL's goals of simplicity, security and sanity. We do not add new features, ciphers and API without a solid reason and require that new code be clean and of high quality.
LibreSSL is not ABI compatible with any release of OpenSSL, or necessarily earlier releases of LibreSSL. You will need to relink your programs to LibreSSL in order to use it, just as in moving between major versions of OpenSSL. LibreSSL's installed library version numbers are incremented to account for ABI and API changes.
While primarily developed on and taking advantage of APIs available on OpenBSD, the LibreSSL portable project attempts to provide working alternatives for other operating systems, and assists with improving OS-native implementations where possible.
At the time of this writing, LibreSSL is known to build and work on:
- Linux (kernel 3.17 or later recommended)
- FreeBSD (tested with 9.2 and later)
- NetBSD (7.0 or later recommended)
- HP-UX (11i)
- Solaris 11 and later
- Mac OS X (tested with 10.8 and later)
- AIX (5.3 and later)
LibreSSL also supports the following Windows environments:
- Microsoft Windows (Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008r2 or later, x86 and x64)
- Wine (32-bit and 64-bit)
- MinGW-w64, Cygwin, and Visual Studio
Official release tarballs are available at your friendly neighborhood OpenBSD mirror in directory LibreSSL, although we suggest that you use a mirror.
The LibreSSL portable build framework is also mirrored on GitHub.
Please report bugs either to the public [email protected] mailing list, or to the GitHub issue tracker
Severe vulnerabilities or bugs requiring coordination with OpenSSL can be sent to the core team at [email protected].
If you have checked out this source using Git, or have downloaded a source tarball from GitHub, follow these initial steps to prepare the source tree for building. Note: Your build will fail if you do not follow these instructions! If you cannot follow these instructions or cannot meet these prerequisites, please download an official release distribution from https://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/LibreSSL/ instead. Using official releases is strongly advised if you are not a developer.
- Ensure that you have a bash shell. This is also required on Windows.
- Ensure that you have the following packages installed: automake, autoconf, git, libtool, perl.
- Run
./autogen.sh
to prepare the source tree for building.
Once you have the source tree prepared, run these commands to build and install:
./configure # see ./configure --help for configuration options
make check # runs builtin unit tests
make install # set DESTDIR= to install to an alternate location
Alternatively, it is possible to run ./dist.sh
to prepare a tarball.
Once you have the source tree prepared, run these commands to build and install:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
make test
For faster builds, you can use Ninja:
mkdir build-ninja
cd build-ninja
cmake -G"Ninja" ..
ninja
ninja test
Or another supported build system like Visual Studio:
mkdir build-vs2022
cd build-vs2022
cmake -G"Visual Studio 17 2022" ..
Option Name | Default | Description |
---|---|---|
LIBRESSL_SKIP_INSTALL |
OFF |
allows skipping install() rules. Can be specified from command line using -DLIBRESSL_SKIP_INSTALL=ON |
LIBRESSL_APPS |
ON |
allows skipping application builds. Apps are required to run tests |
LIBRESSL_TESTS |
ON |
allows skipping of tests. Tests are only available in static builds |
BUILD_SHARED_LIBS |
OFF |
CMake option for building shared libraries. |
ENABLE_ASM |
ON |
builds assembly optimized rules. |
ENABLE_EXTRATESTS |
OFF |
Enable extra tests that may be unreliable on some platforms |
ENABLE_NC |
OFF |
Enable installing TLS-enabled nc(1) |
OPENSSLDIR |
Blank | Set the default openssl directory. Can be specified from command line using -DOPENSSLDIR=<dirname> |
Set the UNIX_STD environment variable to 2003
before running configure
in order to build with the HP C/aC++ compiler. See the "standards(5)" man
page for more details.
export UNIX_STD=2003
./configure
make
LibreSSL builds against relatively recent versions of MinGW-w64, not to be confused with the original mingw.org project. MinGW-w64 3.2 or later should work. See README.mingw.md for more information.
Make a new folder in your project root (where your main CMakeLists.txt
file is
located) called CMake. Copy the FindLibreSSL.cmake
file to that folder, and
add the following line to your main CMakeLists.txt
:
set(CMAKE_MODULE_PATH "${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/CMake;${CMAKE_MODULE_PATH}")
After your add_executable
or add_library
line in your CMakeLists.txt
file
add the following:
find_package(LibreSSL REQUIRED)
It will tell CMake to find LibreSSL and if found will let you use the following
3 interfaces in your CMakeLists.txt
file:
- LibreSSL::Crypto
- LibreSSL::SSL
- LibreSSL::TLS
If you for example want to use the LibreSSL TLS library in your test program, include it like so (SSL and Crypto are required by TLS and included automatically too):
target_link_libraries(test LibreSSL::TLS)
Full example:
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.10.0)
set(CMAKE_MODULE_PATH "${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/CMake;${CMAKE_MODULE_PATH}")
project(test)
add_executable(test Main.cpp)
find_package(LibreSSL REQUIRED)
target_link_libraries(test LibreSSL::TLS)
Following the guide in the sections above to compile LibreSSL using make and
running sudo make install
will install LibreSSL to the /usr/local/
folder,
and will be found automatically by find_package. If your system installs it to
another location, or you have placed them yourself in a different location, you
can set the CMake variable LIBRESSL_ROOT_DIR
to the correct path, to help
CMake find the library.
Placing the library files in C:/Program Files/LibreSSL/lib
and the include
files in C:/Program Files/LibreSSL/include
should let CMake find them
automatically, but it is recommended that you use CMake-GUI to set the paths.
It is more convenient as you can have the files in any folder you choose.