wolfSSL


wolfSSL
Developer(s)Todd Ouska
Initial releaseFebruary 19, 2006 (2006-02-19)[1]
Stable release
5.8.2[2] Edit this on Wikidata / 17 July 2025
Repositorygithub.com/wolfssl/wolfssl
Written inC
Operating systemMulti-platform
TypeCryptography library
LicenseGPL-2.0-or-later or proprietary[3]
Websitewww.wolfssl.com

wolfSSL is a small, portable, embedded SSL/TLS library targeted for use by embedded systems developers. It is an open source implementation of TLS (SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and DTLS 1.0, 1.2, and 1.3) written in the C programming language. It includes SSL/TLS client libraries and an SSL/TLS server implementation as well as support for multiple APIs, including those defined by SSL and TLS. wolfSSL also includes an OpenSSL compatibility interface with the most commonly used OpenSSL functions.[4][5]

Platforms

wolfSSL is currently available for Microsoft Windows, Linux, macOS, Solaris, ESP32, ESP8266, ThreadX, VxWorks, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, embedded Linux, Yocto Project, OpenEmbedded, WinCE, Haiku, OpenWrt, iPhone, Android, Wii, and GameCube through DevKitPro support, QNX, MontaVista, Tron variants, NonStop OS, OpenCL, Micrium's MicroC/OS-II, FreeRTOS, SafeRTOS, Freescale MQX, Nucleus, TinyOS, TI-RTOS, HP-UX, uTasker, uT-kernel, embOS, INtime, mbed, RIOT, CMSIS-RTOS, FROSTED, Green Hills INTEGRITY, Keil RTX, TOPPERS, PetaLinux, Apache Mynewt, and PikeOS.[6]

History

The genesis of wolfSSL dates to 2004. OpenSSL was available at the time, and was dual licensed under the OpenSSL License and the SSLeay license.[7] yaSSL, alternatively, was developed and dual-licensed under both a commercial license and the GPL.[8] yaSSL offered a more modern API, commercial style developer support and was complete with an OpenSSL compatibility layer.[4] The first major user of wolfSSL/CyaSSL/yaSSL was MySQL.[9] Through bundling with MySQL, yaSSL has achieved extremely high distribution volumes in the millions.

In February 2019, Daniel Stenberg, the creator of cURL, was hired by the wolfSSL project to work on cURL.[10]

Protocols

Main article: Transport Layer Security

The wolfSSL lightweight SSL library implements the following protocols:[11]

Protocol Notes:

  • SSL 2.0 – SSL 2.0 was deprecated (prohibited) in 2011 by RFC 6176. wolfSSL does not support it.
  • SSL 3.0 – SSL 3.0 was deprecated (prohibited) in 2015 by RFC 7568. In response to the POODLE attack, SSL 3.0 has been disabled by default since wolfSSL 3.6.6, but can be enabled with a compile-time option.[12]

Algorithms

wolfSSL uses the following cryptography libraries:

wolfCrypt

By default, wolfSSL uses the cryptographic services provided by wolfCrypt.[13] wolfCrypt Provides RSA, ECC, DSS, Diffie–Hellman, EDH, NTRU (deprecated and removed), DES, Triple DES, AES (CBC, CTR, CCM, GCM), Camellia, IDEA, ARC4, HC-128, ChaCha20, MD2, MD4, MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2, SHA-3, BLAKE2, RIPEMD-160, Poly1305, Random Number Generation, Large Integer support, base 16/64 encoding/decoding, and post-quantum cryptographic algorithms: ML-KEM (certified under FIPS 203) and ML-DSA (certified under FIPS 204).

wolfCrypt also includes support for the recent X25519 and Ed25519 algorithms.

wolfCrypt acts as a back-end crypto implementation for several popular software packages and libraries, including MIT Kerberos[14] (where it can be enabled using a build option).

NTRU

CyaSSL+ includes NTRU[15] public key encryption. The addition of NTRU in CyaSSL+ was a result of the partnership between yaSSL and Security Innovation.[15] NTRU works well in mobile and embedded environments due to the reduced bit size needed to provide the same security as other public key systems. In addition, it's not known to be vulnerable to quantum attacks. Several cipher suites utilizing NTRU are available with CyaSSL+ including AES-256, RC4, and HC-128.

Hardware Integration

Secure Element Support

wolfSSL supports the following Secure Elements:

Technology Support

wolfSSL supports the following hardware technologies:

  • Intel SGX (Software Guard Extensions) [16] - Intel SGX allows a smaller attack surface and has been shown to provide a higher level of security for executing code without a significant impact on performance.

Licensing

wolfSSL is dual licensed:

  • Licensed under the GPL-2.0-or-later license. This is good for GPL open source projects and evaluation.
  • Licensed under a commercial non-GPL license. This comes with additional support and maintenance packages and is priced at 7,500 USD per product or SKU as of 2025.

See also

References

  1. ^ "wolfSSL ChangeLog". 10 August 2017.
  2. ^ . 17 July 2025 https://github.com/wolfSSL/wolfssl/releases/tag/v5.8.2-stable. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  3. ^ "LICENSING". GitHub.
  4. ^ a b wolfSSL – Embedded Communications Products
  5. ^ "What You Need to Know About the TLS 1.3 Protocol and wolfSSL's SSL/TLS Libraries". www.allaboutcircuits.com. Retrieved 2018-12-28.
  6. ^ "wolfSSL Embedded SSL/TLS Library | wolfSSL Products". 4 August 2017. Retrieved 2019-01-31.
  7. ^ OpenSSL: Source, License
  8. ^ wolfSSL – License
  9. ^ "MySQL, Building MySQL with Support for Secure Connections". Archived from the original on 2017-07-06. Retrieved 2016-06-12.
  10. ^ Daniel Stenberg, founder and Chief Architect of cURL, joins wolfSSL
  11. ^ wolfSSL – Docs | CyaSSL Manual – Chapter 4 (Features)
  12. ^ "wolfSSL 3.6.6 is Now Available".
  13. ^ wolfSSL – Docs | wolfSSL Manual – Chapter 10 (wolfCrypt Usage Reference)
  14. ^ Kerberos: The Network Authentication Protocol
  15. ^ a b NTRU CryptoLabs Archived 2013-02-02 at archive.today
  16. ^ wolfSSL – wolfSSL with Intel® SGX
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