.\" $OpenBSD: engine.3,v 1.16 2018/04/15 17:02:03 schwarze Exp $ .\" full merge up to: OpenSSL crypto/engine e6390aca Jul 21 10:06:03 2015 -0400 .\" selective merge up to: man3/ENGINE_add 1f13ad31 Dec 25 17:50:39 2017 +0800 .\" .\" This file was written by Geoff Thorpe .\" with contributions from Paul Yang . .\" Copyright (c) 2002, 2004, 2007, 2015, 2017 The OpenSSL Project. .\" All rights reserved. .\" .\" Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without .\" modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions .\" are met: .\" .\" 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright .\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. .\" .\" 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright .\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in .\" the documentation and/or other materials provided with the .\" distribution. .\" .\" 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this .\" software must display the following acknowledgment: .\" "This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project .\" for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit. (http://www.openssl.org/)" .\" .\" 4. The names "OpenSSL Toolkit" and "OpenSSL Project" must not be used to .\" endorse or promote products derived from this software without .\" prior written permission. For written permission, please contact .\" openssl-core@openssl.org. .\" .\" 5. Products derived from this software may not be called "OpenSSL" .\" nor may "OpenSSL" appear in their names without prior written .\" permission of the OpenSSL Project. .\" .\" 6. Redistributions of any form whatsoever must retain the following .\" acknowledgment: .\" "This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project .\" for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit (http://www.openssl.org/)" .\" .\" THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE OpenSSL PROJECT ``AS IS'' AND ANY .\" EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE .\" IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR .\" PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE OpenSSL PROJECT OR .\" ITS CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, .\" SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT .\" NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; .\" LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) .\" HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, .\" STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) .\" ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED .\" OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. .\" .Dd $Mdocdate: April 15 2018 $ .Dt ENGINE 3 .Os .Sh NAME .Nm engine .Nd ENGINE cryptographic module support .Sh DESCRIPTION These functions create, manipulate, and use cryptographic modules in the form of .Vt ENGINE objects. These objects act as containers for implementations of cryptographic algorithms, and support a reference-counted mechanism to allow them to be dynamically loaded in and out of the running application. .Pp The cryptographic functionality that can be provided by an .Vt ENGINE implementation includes the following abstractions: .Pp .Bl -bullet -compact .It .Vt RSA_METHOD : for providing alternative RSA implementations .It .Vt DSA_METHOD , DH_METHOD , RAND_METHOD , ECDH_METHOD , .Vt ECDSA_METHOD , STORE_METHOD : similarly for other OpenSSL APIs .It .Vt EVP_CIPHER : potentially multiple cipher algorithms (indexed by 'nid') .It .Vt EVP_DIGEST : potentially multiple hash algorithms (indexed by 'nid') .It key-loading: loading public and/or private EVP_PKEY keys .El .Ss Reference counting and handles Due to the modular nature of the .Nm engine API, pointers to .Vt ENGINE Ns s need to be treated as handles - i.e. not only as pointers, but also as references to the underlying .Vt ENGINE object. One should obtain a new reference when making copies of an .Vt ENGINE pointer if the copies will be used (and released) independently. .Pp .Vt ENGINE objects have two levels of reference-counting to match the way in which the objects are used. At the most basic level, each .Vt ENGINE pointer is inherently a .Sy structural reference - a structural reference is required to use the pointer value at all, as this kind of reference is a guarantee that the structure cannot be deallocated until the reference is released. .Pp However, a structural reference provides no guarantee that the .Vt ENGINE is initialised and able to use any of its cryptographic implementations. Indeed it's quite possible that most .Vt ENGINE Ns s will not initialise at all in typical environments, as .Vt ENGINE Ns s are typically used to support specialised hardware. To use an .Vt ENGINE Ap s functionality, you need a .Sy functional reference. This kind of reference can be considered a specialised form of structural reference, because each functional reference implicitly contains a structural reference as well - however to avoid difficult-to-find programming bugs, it is recommended to treat the two kinds of reference independently. If you have a functional reference to an .Vt ENGINE , you have a guarantee that the .Vt ENGINE has been initialised and is ready to perform cryptographic operations and will remain uninitialised until after you have released your reference. .Pp .Em Structural references .Pp This basic type of reference is used for instantiating new .Vt ENGINE Ns s , iterating across OpenSSL's internal linked-list of loaded .Vt ENGINE Ns s , reading information about an .Vt ENGINE , etc. Essentially a structural reference is sufficient if you only need to query or manipulate the data of an .Vt ENGINE implementation rather than use its functionality. .Ss Application requirements This section will explain the basic things an application programmer should support to make the most useful elements of the .Nm engine functionality available to the user. The first thing to consider is whether the programmer wishes to make alternative .Vt ENGINE modules available to the application and user. OpenSSL maintains an internal linked list of "visible" .Vt ENGINE Ns s from which it has to operate. At start-up, this list is empty, and in fact if an application does not call any .Nm engine API calls and it uses static linking against openssl, then the resulting application binary will not contain any alternative .Nm engine code at all. So the first consideration is whether any/all available .Vt ENGINE implementations should be made visible to OpenSSL. .Pp Having called any of these functions, .Vt ENGINE objects would have been dynamically allocated and populated with these implementations and linked into OpenSSL's internal linked list. .Pp The fact that .Vt ENGINE Ns s are made visible to OpenSSL (and thus are linked into the program and loaded into memory at run-time) does not mean they are "registered" or called into use by OpenSSL automatically - that behaviour is something for the application to control. Some applications will want to allow the user to specify exactly which .Vt ENGINE they want used if any is to be used at all. Others may prefer to load all support and have OpenSSL automatically use at run-time any .Vt ENGINE that is able to successfully initialised - i.e. to assume that this corresponds to acceleration hardware attached to the machine or some such thing. There are probably numerous other ways in which applications may prefer to handle things, so we will simply illustrate the consequences as they apply to a couple of simple cases and leave developers to consider these and the source code to openssl's builtin utilities as guides. .Pp .Em Using a specific ENGINE implementation .Pp Here we'll assume an application has been configured by its user or admin to want to use the "ACME" .Vt ENGINE if it is available in the version of OpenSSL the application was compiled with. If it is available, it should be used by default for all RSA, DSA, and symmetric cipher operations, otherwise OpenSSL should use its builtin software as usual. The following code illustrates how to approach this: .Bd -literal ENGINE *e; const char *engine_id = "ACME"; ENGINE_load_builtin_engines(); e = ENGINE_by_id(engine_id); if (!e) /* the engine isn't available */ return; if (!ENGINE_init(e)) { /* the engine couldn't initialise, release 'e' */ ENGINE_free(e); return; } if (!ENGINE_set_default_RSA(e)) /* This should only happen when 'e' can't initialise, but the previous * statement suggests it did. */ abort(); ENGINE_set_default_DSA(e); ENGINE_set_default_ciphers(e); /* Release the functional reference from ENGINE_init() */ ENGINE_finish(e); /* Release the structural reference from ENGINE_by_id() */ ENGINE_free(e); .Ed .Pp .Em Automatically using builtin ENGINE implementations .Pp Here we'll assume we want to load and register all .Vt ENGINE implementations bundled with OpenSSL, such that for any cryptographic algorithm required by OpenSSL - if there is an .Vt ENGINE that implements it and can be initialised, it should be used. The following code illustrates how this can work; .Bd -literal /* Load all bundled ENGINEs into memory and make them visible */ ENGINE_load_builtin_engines(); /* Register all of them for every algorithm they collectively implement */ ENGINE_register_all_complete(); .Ed .Pp That's all that's required. For example, the next time OpenSSL tries to set up an RSA key, any bundled .Vt ENGINE Ns s that implement .Vt RSA_METHOD will be passed to .Xr ENGINE_init 3 and if any of those succeed, that .Vt ENGINE will be set as the default for RSA use from then on. .Ss Advanced configuration support There is a mechanism supported by the .Nm engine framework that allows each .Vt ENGINE implementation to define an arbitrary set of configuration "commands" and expose them to OpenSSL and any applications based on OpenSSL. This mechanism is entirely based on the use of name-value pairs and assumes ASCII input (no unicode or UTF for now!), so it is ideal if applications want to provide a transparent way for users to provide arbitrary configuration "directives" directly to such .Vt ENGINE Ns s . It is also possible for the application to dynamically interrogate the loaded .Vt ENGINE implementations for the names, descriptions, and input flags of their available "control commands", providing a more flexible configuration scheme. However, if the user is expected to know which .Vt ENGINE device he/she is using (in the case of specialised hardware, this goes without saying) then applications may not need to concern themselves with discovering the supported control commands and simply prefer to pass settings into .Vt ENGINE s exactly as they are provided by the user. .Pp Before illustrating how control commands work, it is worth mentioning what they are typically used for. Broadly speaking there are two uses for control commands; the first is to provide the necessary details to the implementation (which may know nothing at all specific to the host system) so that it can be initialised for use. This could include the path to any driver or config files it needs to load, required network addresses, smart-card identifiers, passwords to initialise protected devices, logging information, etc. This class of commands typically needs to be passed to an .Vt ENGINE .Sy before attempting to initialise it, i.e. before calling .Xr ENGINE_init 3 . The other class of commands consist of settings or operations that tweak certain behaviour or cause certain operations to take place, and these commands may work either before or after .Xr ENGINE_init 3 , or in some cases both. .Vt ENGINE implementations should provide indications of this in the descriptions attached to builtin control commands and/or in external product documentation. .Pp .Em Issuing control commands to an ENGINE .Pp Let's illustrate by example; a function for which the caller supplies the name of the .Vt ENGINE it wishes to use, a table of string-pairs for use before initialisation, and another table for use after initialisation. Note that the string-pairs used for control commands consist of a command "name" followed by the command "parameter" - the parameter could be .Dv NULL in some cases but the name cannot. This function should initialise the .Vt ENGINE (issuing the "pre" commands beforehand and the "post" commands afterwards) and set it as the default for everything except RAND and then return a boolean success or failure. .Bd -literal int generic_load_engine_fn(const char *engine_id, const char **pre_cmds, int pre_num, const char **post_cmds, int post_num) { ENGINE *e = ENGINE_by_id(engine_id); if (!e) return 0; while (pre_num--) { if (!ENGINE_ctrl_cmd_string(e, pre_cmds[0], pre_cmds[1], 0)) { fprintf(stderr, "Failed command (%s - %s:%s)\en", engine_id, pre_cmds[0], pre_cmds[1] ? pre_cmds[1] : "(NULL)"); ENGINE_free(e); return 0; } pre_cmds += 2; } if (!ENGINE_init(e)) { fprintf(stderr, "Failed initialisation\en"); ENGINE_free(e); return 0; } /* * ENGINE_init() returned a functional reference, * so free the structural reference from * ENGINE_by_id(). */ ENGINE_free(e); while (post_num--) { if (!ENGINE_ctrl_cmd_string(e, post_cmds[0], post_cmds[1], 0)) { fprintf(stderr, "Failed command (%s - %s:%s)\en", engine_id, post_cmds[0], post_cmds[1] ? post_cmds[1] : "(NULL)"); ENGINE_finish(e); return 0; } post_cmds += 2; } ENGINE_set_default(e, ENGINE_METHOD_ALL & ~ENGINE_METHOD_RAND); /* Success */ return 1; } .Ed .Pp Note that .Fn ENGINE_ctrl_cmd_string accepts a boolean argument that can relax the semantics of the function. If set to non-zero it will only return failure if the .Vt ENGINE supported the given command name but failed while executing it, if the .Vt ENGINE doesn't support the command name it will simply return success without doing anything. In this case we assume the user is only supplying commands specific to the given .Vt ENGINE so we set this to FALSE. .Pp .Em Discovering supported control commands .Pp It is possible to discover at run-time the names, numerical-ids, descriptions and input parameters of the control commands supported by an .Vt ENGINE using a structural reference. Note that some control commands are defined by OpenSSL itself and it will intercept and handle these control commands on behalf of the .Vt ENGINE , i.e. the .Vt ENGINE Ap s ctrl() handler is not used for the control command. .In openssl/engine.h defines an index, .Dv ENGINE_CMD_BASE , that all control commands implemented by .Vt ENGINE Ns s should be numbered from. Any command value lower than this symbol is considered a "generic" command is handled directly by the OpenSSL core routines. .Pp It is using these "core" control commands that one can discover the control commands implemented by a given .Vt ENGINE , specifically the commands: .Bd -literal #define ENGINE_HAS_CTRL_FUNCTION 10 #define ENGINE_CTRL_GET_FIRST_CMD_TYPE 11 #define ENGINE_CTRL_GET_NEXT_CMD_TYPE 12 #define ENGINE_CTRL_GET_CMD_FROM_NAME 13 #define ENGINE_CTRL_GET_NAME_LEN_FROM_CMD 14 #define ENGINE_CTRL_GET_NAME_FROM_CMD 15 #define ENGINE_CTRL_GET_DESC_LEN_FROM_CMD 16 #define ENGINE_CTRL_GET_DESC_FROM_CMD 17 #define ENGINE_CTRL_GET_CMD_FLAGS 18 .Ed .Pp Whilst these commands are automatically processed by the OpenSSL framework code, they use various properties exposed by each .Vt ENGINE to process these queries. An .Vt ENGINE has 3 properties it exposes that can affect how this behaves; it can supply a ctrl() handler, it can specify .Dv ENGINE_FLAGS_MANUAL_CMD_CTRL in the .Vt ENGINE Ap s flags, and it can expose an array of control command descriptions. If an .Vt ENGINE specifies the .Dv ENGINE_FLAGS_MANUAL_CMD_CTRL flag, then it will simply pass all these "core" control commands directly to the .Vt ENGINE Ap s ctrl() handler (and thus, it must have supplied one), so it is up to the .Vt ENGINE to reply to these "discovery" commands itself. If that flag is not set, then the OpenSSL framework code will work with the following rules; .Bl -tag -width Ds .It If no ctrl() handler is supplied: .Dv ENGINE_HAS_CTRL_FUNCTION returns FALSE (zero), all other commands fail. .It If a ctrl() handler was supplied but no array of control commands: .Dv ENGINE_HAS_CTRL_FUNCTION returns TRUE, all other commands fail. .It If a ctrl() handler and array of control commands was supplied: .Dv ENGINE_HAS_CTRL_FUNCTION returns TRUE, all other commands proceed processing... .El .Pp If the .Vt ENGINE Ns s array of control commands is empty, then all other commands will fail. Otherwise .Dv ENGINE_CTRL_GET_FIRST_CMD_TYPE returns the identifier of the first command supported by the .Vt ENGINE , .Dv ENGINE_GET_NEXT_CMD_TYPE takes the identifier of a command supported by the .Vt ENGINE and returns the next command identifier or fails if there are no more, .Dv ENGINE_CMD_FROM_NAME takes a string name for a command and returns the corresponding identifier or fails if no such command name exists, and the remaining commands take a command identifier and return properties of the corresponding commands. All except .Dv ENGINE_CTRL_GET_FLAGS return the string length of a command name or description, or populate a supplied character buffer with a copy of the command name or description. .Dv ENGINE_CTRL_GET_FLAGS returns a bitwise-OR'd mask of the following possible values: .Bd -literal #define ENGINE_CMD_FLAG_NUMERIC (unsigned int)0x0001 #define ENGINE_CMD_FLAG_STRING (unsigned int)0x0002 #define ENGINE_CMD_FLAG_NO_INPUT (unsigned int)0x0004 #define ENGINE_CMD_FLAG_INTERNAL (unsigned int)0x0008 .Ed .Pp If the .Dv ENGINE_CMD_FLAG_INTERNAL flag is set, then any other flags are purely informational to the caller. This flag will prevent the command being usable for any higher-level .Vt ENGINE functions such as .Fn ENGINE_ctrl_cmd_string . "INTERNAL" commands are not intended to be exposed to text-based configuration by applications, administrations, users, etc. These can support arbitrary operations via .Fn ENGINE_ctrl , including passing to and/or from the control commands data of any arbitrary type. These commands are supported in the discovery mechanisms simply allow applications to determine if an .Vt ENGINE supports certain specific commands it might want to use (e.g. application "foo" might query various .Vt ENGINE Ns s to see if they implement "FOO_GET_VENDOR_LOGO_GIF" - and .Vt ENGINE could therefore decide whether or not to support this "foo"-specific extension). .Sh SEE ALSO .Xr DH_new 3 , .Xr DSA_new 3 , .Xr ENGINE_add_conf_module 3 , .Xr ENGINE_set_ex_data 3 , .Xr RSA_new 3 .Sh HISTORY The engine API first appeared in OpenSSL 0.9.7 and has been available since .Ox 3.2 .