I have never had a break in.   The Fortinet 60E firewall does an amazing job.   
I will just leave it up to Ubuntu to provide the best OpenSSL solutions.   Many 
people complain Ubuntu LTS is never on the latest kernel and lacks other things 
the 9 month distros like 21.04 and 21.10 give you.    I tend to stay on LTS 
solutions.    I do patch weekly.

From: Jan Just Keijser <janj...@nikhef.nl>
Sent: Monday, May 31, 2021 8:45 AM
To: Michael McKenney <mike.mcken...@scsiraidguru.com>; openssl-users@openssl.org
Subject: Re: Why can't we get a proper installation method to keep OpenSSL at 
the latest revision for Linux?

Hi,

On 31/05/21 13:01, Michael McKenney wrote:
My wordpress servers are under constant attack.  My Fortinet 60E firewall logs 
are filled.  Openssl is constantly reported on The Hacker News and other sites. 
  So I don't need to worry about upgrading OpenSSL in the future to 1.1.1k or 
above?   I can just use what the distro has to offer by apt?  Ubuntu 20.04 
started with 1.1.1f.    My Kali server is mainly used for Try Hack Me 
challenges and learn cyber security.

if you use an LTS distro then you can trust the distro makers - if not, then 
there are thousands of servers out there that are vulnerable ;)

I run several public Wordpress sites on CentOS 7 and have locked them down 
quite rigorously - I have not had any breakins for the past 7 years or so, 
whilst relying fully on the RH/CentOS-supplied openssl library.

HTH,

JJK



From: Jan Just Keijser <janj...@nikhef.nl><mailto:janj...@nikhef.nl>
Sent: Monday, May 31, 2021 5:55 AM
To: Michael McKenney 
<mike.mcken...@scsiraidguru.com><mailto:mike.mcken...@scsiraidguru.com>; 
openssl-users@openssl.org<mailto:openssl-users@openssl.org>
Subject: Re: Why can't we get a proper installation method to keep OpenSSL at 
the latest revision for Linux?

On 30/05/21 14:05, Michael McKenney wrote:
Why can't we get a proper installation method to keep OpenSSL at the latest 
revision for Linux?

My biggest compliant with Linux is it is so difficult to get best practice 
installations for services like OpenSSL.   Ubuntu is still on 1.1.1f.    I have 
been trying to upgrade to 1.1.1k.   Openssl version -a states I am on 1.1.1k.   
When programs in Wordpress that use OpenSSL show I am using 1.1.1.f.   Spending 
hours of time on various sites like AskUbuntu.com, only to be disappointed.   
Microsoft has best practices guides for installations.   Why can't we get them 
for Linux.


this is both very hard and undesirable:
openssl can be regarded as a low-level system library that is used by many 
applications across the entire Linux distribution. You cannot simply upgrade 
this low-level system library without breaking these applications. Admittedly, 
for an upgrade from 1.1.1f -> 1.1.1k the risk of introducing an API change is 
quite low, but for anything else (e.g. 1.1.0x -> 1.1.1k) you will almost 
certainly have to rebuild and relink all applications that depend on the 
OpenSSL libraries.
This is not something you can expect from the Linux distro maintainers. For 
them, it is far less risky to backport security fixes to the version of OpenSSL 
that they built their distro on (e.g. Ubuntu 20 > 1.1.1f; CentOS 7 -> 1.0.2k 
(yes!), etc).

Note that most update woes that Windows 10 has had over the past few years were 
related to library updates breaking applications - so even microsoft has 
problems with "best practices".

HTH,

JJK

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