GnuTLS in Debian

Andreas Metzler ametzler at debian.org
Sun Dec 22 19:12:40 UTC 2013


Hello,

Debian ist still relying heavily on GnuTLS 2.12.x, and I do not think
this is sustainable for much longer.

State of Play:
---------
In July 2011 with version 3.0 [1] GnuTLS switched to Nettle as only
supported crypto backend. Nettle requires GMP.

GnuTLS and Nettle are available under LGPLv2.1+.  GMP used to be
licensed LGPLv2.1+ ages ago but upgraded to LGPLv3+ in version 4.2.2
(released September 2007).

Therefore GnuTLS 3.x cannot be used by GPLv2 (without "or later"
clause) software which is the main reason most of Debian is still
using GnuTLS 2.x.

Problems:
---------
GnuTLS 2.12.x is dated. It is upstream's old-old-old stable release
(followed by 3.[012].x). The latest bugfix release happened in
February 2012, later security fixes have not been solved by releases but
by patches in GIT. GnuTLS 2.12.x does not work with the recently released
gcrypt 1.6.0. Therefore we will need keep another old library version
around. (I doubt that GnuTLS upstream will port GnuTLS 2.12.x to newer
gcrypt.)

How to continue from here/solve this:
---------
#1 Fork LGPLv2.1+ GMP (version 4.2.1) for Debian.

#2 Fork GnuTLS 2 for Debian.

#3 Hope that GMP is relicensed to GPL2+/LGPLv3+

#4 Hop nettle switches to a different arbitrary precision arithmetic 
library.

#5 Declare GMP to be a system library.

#6 Move to GnuTLS3, drop GnuTLS2. Packages which cannot use GnuTLS3
for license reasons will need to drop TLS support or be relicensed or
be ported to a different TLS library.


Personal comments:
---------
I do not think #1 and #2 are realistic given Debian's manpower issues. Also
#1 would stop working at all if nettle required newer GMP features. (I
have not checked whether this is already the case.)

I have given up on #3 and do not think it will happen. GMP upstream has
been made aware of the issue in 2011 [2] and has not shown any intention of
a license change.

#4 is just here for completeness sake.

#5 was how Fedora looked at the OpenSSL library issue. Since Debian
has another viewpoint on OpenSSL I somehow doubt we would use it for
GMP.

Fedora is discussing the issue in
<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=986347>. There is
automatically generated depency tree with the problematic packages
highlighted crosslinked in the bugreport[3]. Debian does not have the
infrastructure to do something similar, but I guess gnutls usage is
more widespread.

Summary:
---------
Afaict it boils down to #6. But perhaps I have missed something
obvious. Comments welcome.

cu Andreas


[1] Version 2.11.1 (released 2010-09-14) used nettle as
/prefered/ crypto backend, however gcrypt was still supported as
alternative.

[2] http://gmplib.org/list-archives/gmp-bugs/2011-February/002178.html 
http://gmplib.org/list-archives/gmp-devel/2011-May/001952.html

[3] http://people.redhat.com/nmavrogi/fedora/out.fedora.txt
-- 
`What a good friend you are to him, Dr. Maturin. His other friends are
so grateful to you.'
`I sew his ears on from time to time, sure'
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