Team Members:

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and, more recently, its successor Transport Layer Security (TLS) are foundational technologies of secure communications on the Internet. Secure web browsing, Virtual Private Networks (VPN), and other secure protocols (such as SFTP and SSH) leverage TLS to ensure the privacy of their communications. To meet the needs of software developers, many libraries have been created to perform standard TLS functions. Some of these libraries use proprietary code that is difficult to examine to verify security and functionality. However, some of the most widely used SSL/TLS libraries are open source, and are therefore easier to examine and verify. When creating an application that uses TLS, or in some cases simply configuring one, a developer must make choices about which library to leverage for TLS functionality. Of course, it would be possible to create a custom library, but this approach is impractical because it takes significant time and produces a product that has not been verified. Instead, many developers choose to use one of the open source libraries. With this in mind, it would be valuable to perform a comparison of popular open source libraries that would be usable by a developer attempting to choose between them.