Crypto Ancienne: TLS for the Internet of Old Things

[Chris Hanson]

On Nov 16, 2020, at 10:34 AM, Cameron Kaiser via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> If you have an older pre-C99 system, I've backported a TLS 1.2 library to gcc
> versions as early as 2.5 as long as it has 64-bit ints (long long, usually)
> and stdarg.h.
> 
> https://github.com/classilla/cryanc

Great work, Cameron!

Another option for these systems is mbedTLS, originally by ARM. It only requires C89, it can serve as a replacement for SSL libraries that follow the standard API signatures, it is also quite easy to build (a little more complicated than Crypto Ancienne, though not by much--you just need to examine its GNUmakefile to derive a build system for whatever OS you're targeting), and it's fairly complete.

One advantage of mbedTLS is that it works with libcurl, libssh2, etc. already so if you need to build more such things you have a good basis to start from.

At some point MacSSH may use it. Or maybe the current maintainer will try cryanc. :)

  -- Chris