Interesting find on OS X El Capitan

[kpa]

$ ssh -V
OpenSSH_6.9p1, LibreSSL 2.1.7

The OpenSSH version already is quite big news, Apple has been slammed hard lately for not keeping up with developments and leaving their users unprotected. That they dumped OpenSSL in favor of LibreSSL is very very interesting

 

[protocelt]

While I don't use Apple products, it is nice to see this. Maybe this may help increase the usage of LibreSSL across the board similar to what we have with OpenSSH now.

 

[obsigna]

As a matter of fact, Apple replaced OpenSSL by their own TLS framework (Secure Transport) already some years ago, and Apple encourages everybody to use Secure Transport instead of OpenSSL. For example, application developers on Mac OS X and iOS see since Mac OS X 10.7 deprecation warnings when compiling something against the OpenSSL libraries using the OpenSSL headers still included with the system. I would be more than surprised when there would be no deprecation warnings in the LibreSSL headers included with Mac OS X 10.11.

I assume that the move to LibreSSL was not exactly a strategic decision but simple driven by the expectation that new versions of OpenSSH make less problems with accompanied versions of LibreSSL, both being maintained by the same project, namely OpenBSD. I may be wrong, though.