Openssl vs Libressl

chad

Which one is best in your opinion and which one would you recomend?

Donald_Alcorn

As I understood LibreSSL is a fork of OpenSSL:

LibreSSL is a version of the TLS/crypto stack forked from OpenSSL in 2014, with goals of modernizing the codebase, improving security, and applying best practice development processes.

Seems like a good idea to use it.

Is it this library widely used? Why would server administrators choose LibreSSL over OpenSSL?

Josef

Wikipedia has a good article on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreSSL

Some of the highlights:

It replaces OpenSSL on OpenBSD, OS X since 10.11 and on some other systems.
It started with throwing away lots of stuff which was considered useless for the target platforms or insecure by design and it also added some more secure defaults.
The result of this is that from the 6 critical vulnerabilities in OpenSSL since the fork none affected LibreSSL.

So to answer your question

Why would server administrators choose LibreSSL over OpenSSL?

If anybody cares about security or wants to better sleep at night without need to care about the next OpenSSL vulnerability the choice should be clear. I'd use LibreSSL if it was my server.

Adolf

LibreSSL may be better but it's hard to find packages for it 🙁

JohnQTaxpayer

Some software depends on openssl, unless you're familiar with compiling your software yourself instead of using whatever is in your OS package repository you may wanna stick with openssl even tho libressl indeed may be better from a security perspective.