OpenSSL 3.0 Release Candidate Arrives With Big Changes

The OpenSSL project today shipped their OpenSSL 3.0 Beta, which is their equivalent to a release candidate ahead of the planned official 3.0.0 release next quarter.

OpenSSL 3.0 has been in the works for a while as a major redesign to this widely-used critical open-source security component and is now more extensible and provides a number of new features over the current stable 1.1 series. Also another fundamental change is OpenSSL 3.0 is now licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

OpenSSL 3.0 has migrated to a provider-based architecture for allowing greater flexibility. fully "pluggable" TLSv1.3 groups, new encoder and decoder support, a complete Certificate Management Protocol (CMP) implementation, new APIs, and integrated support for kernel TLS are among the many big changes coming with OpenSSL 3.0.

This OpenSSL 3.0 beta (release candidate) comes after more than one dozen alpha releases in recent weeks.

More details on today's OpenSSL 3.0 release candidate can be found via the project site at OpenSSL.org. Many more technical details on the plethora of changes for OpenSSL 3.0 can be found via the OpenSSL Wiki. OpenSSL 3.0.0 stable is expected to come in Q3.