OpenSSL 3.2.0 released: New cryptographic algorithms, support for TCP fast open, and more!

OpenSSL is a full-featured toolkit for general-purpose cryptography and secure communication. The final version of OpenSSL 3.2.0 is now available.

Major changes in OpenSSL 3.2.0

This release incorporates the following potentially significant or incompatible changes:

• The default SSL/TLS security level has been changed from 1 to 2.
• The x509, ca, and req apps now always produce X.509v3 certificates.
• Subject or issuer names in X.509 objects are now displayed as UTF-8 strings by default.

This release adds the following new features:

• Support for client side QUIC, including support for multiple streams (RFC 9000).
• Support for Ed25519ctx, Ed25519ph and Ed448ph in addition to existing support for Ed25519 and Ed448 (RFC 8032).
• Support for deterministic ECDSA signatures (RFC 6979).
• Support for AES-GCM-SIV, a nonce-misuse-resistant AEAD (RFC 8452).
• Support for the Argon2 KDF, along with supporting thread pool functionality (RFC 9106).
• Support for Hybrid Public Key Encryption (HPKE) (RFC 9180).
• Support for SM4-XTS.
• Support for Brainpool curves in TLS 1.3.
• Support for TLS Raw Public Keys (RFC 7250).
• Support for TCP Fast Open on Linux, macOS and FreeBSD, where enabled and supported (RFC 7413).
• Support for TLS certificate compression, including library support for zlib, Brotli and zstd (RFC 8879).
• Support for provider-based pluggable signature algorithms in TLS 1.3 with supporting CMS and X.509 functionality. With a suitable provider this enables the use of post-quantum/quantum-safe cryptography.
• Support for using the Windows system certificate store as a source of trusted root certificates. This is not yet enabled by default and must be activated using an environment variable. This is likely to become enabled by default in a future feature release.
• Support for using the IANA standard names in TLS ciphersuite configuration.
• Multiple new features and improvements to CMP protocol support.

OpenSSL 3.2.0 can be downloaded here or on GitHub.

The next feature release after OpenSSL 3.2 will be OpenSSL 3.3, which will be released no later than April 30, 2024. This release is expected to include QUIC server support.