Damian's March Update

By Damian Jarek on

Apr 4, 2019

This month I’ve been working on the following projects:

• Certify
• Boost.Beast
• Boost.Build
• BeastLounge

Certify

Certify now properly verifies the hostname of a TLS server according to RFC 2818 or TLS-DANE if available. Additionally, initial support for CRLSets has been merged, although it’s still missing integration into the verification code.

I’ve also invested a fair bit of time into researching what other open source libraries do to perform certificate status checking. I’ve looked into BoringSSL, mbedTLS, Botan and even the Go standard library. It’s interesting that no library has a default way of performing the status check of a certificate and it’s left up to the user.

The Windows implementation of the certificate store in Certify will now properly use the entire chain passed by the peer, which resolves certificate failures in less common cases.

Don’t forget to star the repository: https://github.com/djarek/certify!

Boost.Beast

Most of the work this month involved making Beast compile faster and use less memory by expanding the code that can use split compilation and reducing redundant dependencies in a few places.

Boost.Build

I’ve worked on implementing 2 improvements that make it less painful to work with b2:

• support for finding OpenSSL
• support for sanitizers in gcc and clang Both are currently still in review.

BeastLounge

The project lacked functioning CI so I implemented one. Since the project was previously only compiled on MSVC, this proved to be quite challenging, because MSVC accepts code that is not valid C++11. I’ve also created a deplyoment docker image, which allows running the application in popular cloud environments, like Heroku. A development version of the app is available at https://beast-lounge.herokuapp.com/.