[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: tls, native TLS/SSL protocolimplementation

Vincent Hanquez tab at snarc.org
Sat Oct 9 03:58:36 EDT 2010


On Fri, Oct 08, 2010 at 12:54:48PM +0100, Sittampalam, Ganesh wrote:
> What's the motivation for this?

Well, I wanted to have a tls/ssl module that integrate nicely with haskell.
until then the 2 solutions were:

- shelling out to curl: that's not great, usually works until you have an error, and
then you're greeted with a curl command line error. the control is pretty poor, what
if you want a fancy certificate control ? Also you have absolutely no server
support in this case, this is client only.

- using either gnutls or openssl bindings: there's multiples reasons this is not great.
depending on huge C libraries (security wise, platform wise), massive usage of
IO even in place where it shouldn't, low hacking potential (adding ciphers/hash, etc).

Apart from that, we all know here why programming in haskell is better than doing the
same thing in says, C or python. I think it apply even more when the focus of this is
a secure library.

-- 
Vincent


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