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Comment by antocv | Hacker News Reader

GnuTLS exists. And NSS in mozilla. Probably others too.

cURL makes a nice comparison: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/ssl-compared.html

GnuTLS had its own problems recently (see: http://www.gnutls.org/security.html), and regarding NSS... I couldn't find a proper public "security" page for it (eg, release notes for 3.16 point to CVE-2014-1492; but the link to the bugzilla issue is not public), so I don't know.

Obviously a good security record doesn't imply things like a good code base, good practices, etc; (although it could).

Regarding the NSS CVE-2014-1492: https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2014-14...

Quote: "The cert_TestHostName function in lib/certdb/certdb.c in the certificate-checking implementation in Mozilla Network Security Services (NSS) before 3.16 accepts a wildcard character that is embedded in an internationalized domain name's U-label, which might allow man-in-the-middle attackers to spoof SSL servers via a crafted certificate."

Edit: Added Quote

Thanks, I can look for a CVE myself ;)

My point is that having a proper security page is a good practice and I really appreciate it as user.

That chart is out of date. For example, NSS now supports TLS 1.2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_TLS_implementati...

I always felt like there unfortunately was no proper alternative to libopenssl (might be unfair but it seemed like a somewhat smelly library) but thanks to this event I've now been made aware of all the alternatives.

How much more fun/comfortable is NSS/GnuTLS to use in a typical C project in comparison to OpenSSL?

Great potential to learn for developers and users alike this heartbleed.

There are quite a few alternatives (you may also want to look at matrixssl, polarssl/tropicssl and cryptlib), but if you use one of them, people will report interop problems as bugs in your code.

Been there, done that. Sad to say, but I now use openssl.

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