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defdefred defdefred at protonmail.com
Wed Jul 1 23:11:10 BST 2020
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netcat ?
freD.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐On Thursday 2 July 2020 00:06, Phil Leblanc <philanc at gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I am looking for a solution to build a small, statically linked,
minimal gemini client. My focus at the moment is to implement the
basic communication layer (including TLS!): just enough to send a
request to a gemini host and receive a response.
Has anybody already built such a client? any pointer or suggestion?
Where I stand as of now:
--- I discarded OpenSSL. Bad memories of building small static
executables a long time ago. Maybe it has improved and I am just
prejudiced.
--- LibreSSL:
- not TLS v1.3 yet, but definitely alive and moving there.
- easily builds static libraries, but no modular build: I mean I
found no way to build libraries/executable with only a limited set of
crypto algorithms
=
executables are large: The openssl command (similar to the
OpenSSL one) is 2.5 MB (built on Linux with Musl libc, fully static,
-Os, stripped). They also include the OpenBSD 'nc' command which
supports TLS connections - 2 MB (for reference I have a small static
nc without TLS support which is 50KB)
--- BearSSL
- very nice code. An impressive feat for a one-man project (Thomas Pornin)
- not yet at TLS-1.3. The code looks maintained but I don't know if
it is actively developed. I saw no sign of ed25519 cert signing, but
may be wrong here.
- code size: the whole libbearssl.a is ~ 860KB, basic client and
server examples are in the 150KB range, which is very nice.
--- WolfSSL
- supports TLS-1.3. Is actively maintained by a company targeting
embedded systems (but the code is GPL)
- I don't know yet how to properly build small code, but with a
default support for only TLS-1.3, and no ed25519 cert support, I could
build basic client/server examples at ~ 260 KB.
--- MatrixSSL
- supports TLS-1.3 but the code of the last public (GPL) version
hasn't changed in the last 6 months.
- I have not yet succeeded in building static working examples with
a cross compiler. So I don't have ballpark code size figures.
--- Busybox ssl_client
- some TLS support has been added in the recent busybox trees, based
on MatrixSSLcode. As they say, "enough TLS to allow the busybox wget
applet to retrieve a kernel source" from https://kernel.org/
- I built the ssl_client applet as a standalone static exe: 71 KB
- it supports TLS-1.2 with a very limited set of crypto algos. and
no cert validation.
- I tried for fun to retrieve with it the root pages from all the
gemini sites listed on Gus / known hosts: On a total of 116 sites, it
managed to
get 98 root pages and 18 TLS errors (I lack detailed error causes, but
apparently mostly missing algos, and maybe some unsupported curves for
ECDH(E).-- not so bad for such a small "client" - but clearly not
enough for real use.
Obviously, a big part of the equation is the evil number of
combinations of ciphers, hashes and key exchange algos. Any guideline
or best practice document about what ciphers/algos Gemini servers
should minimally support would help immensely!
Again, any suggestion on how to build a small, static SSL client is
more than welcome.Thanks in advance,
Phil