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-NOTES, THOUGHTS, and EVERYTHING
--------------------------------
-
-(1) Concurrency and locking ... I made a change to the ENGINE_free code
-    because I spotted a potential hold-up in proceedings (doing too
-    much inside a lock including calling a callback), there may be
-    other bits like this. What do the speed/optimisation freaks think
-    of this aspect of the code and design? There's lots of locking for
-    manipulation functions and I need that to keep things nice and
-    solid, but this manipulation is mostly (de)initialisation, I would
-    think that most run-time locking is purely in the ENGINE_init and
-    ENGINE_finish calls that might be made when getting handles for
-    RSA (and friends') structures. These would be mostly reference
-    count operations as the functional references should always be 1
-    or greater at run-time to prevent init/deinit thrashing.
-
-(2) nCipher support, via the HWCryptoHook API, is now in the code.
-    Apparently this hasn't been tested too much yet, but it looks
-    good. :-) Atalla support has been added too, but shares a lot in
-    common with Ben's original hooks in bn_exp.c (although it has been
-    ENGINE-ified, and error handling wrapped around it) and it's also
-    had some low-volume testing, so it should be usable.
-
-(3) Of more concern, we need to work out (a) how to put together usable
-    RAND_METHODs for units that just have one "get n or less random
-    bytes" function, (b) we also need to determine how to hook the code
-    in crypto/rand/ to use the ENGINE defaults in a way similar to what
-    has been done in crypto/rsa/, crypto/dsa/, etc.
-
-(4) ENGINE should really grow to encompass more than 3 public key
-    algorithms and randomness gathering. The structure/data level of
-    the engine code is hidden from code outside the crypto/engine/
-    directory so change shouldn't be too viral. More important though
-    is how things should evolve ... this needs thought and discussion.
-
-
------------------------------------==*==-----------------------------------
-
-More notes 2000-08-01
----------------------
-
-Geoff Thorpe, who designed the engine part, wrote a pretty good description
-of the thoughts he had when he built it, good enough to include verbatim here
-(with his permission)					-- Richard Levitte
-
-
-Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 16:54:08 +0100 (BST)
-From: Geoff Thorpe
-Subject: Re: The thoughts to merge BRANCH_engine into the main trunk are
- emerging
-
-Hi there,
-
-I'm going to try and do some justice to this, but I'm a little short on
-time and the there is an endless amount that could be discussed on this
-subject. sigh ... please bear with me :-)
-
-> The changes in BRANCH_engine dig deep into the core of OpenSSL, for example
-> into the RSA and RAND routines, adding a level of indirection which is needed
-> to keep the abstraction, as far as I understand.  It would be a good thing if
-> those who do play with those things took a look at the changes that have been
-> done in the branch and say out loud how much (or hopefully little) we've made
-> fools of ourselves.
-
-The point here is that the code that has emerged in the BRANCH_engine
-branch was based on some initial requirements of mine that I went in and
-addressed, and Richard has picked up the ball and run with it too. It
-would be really useful to get some review of the approach we've taken, but
-first I think I need to describe as best I can the reasons behind what has
-been done so far, in particular what issues we have tried to address when
-doing this, and what issues we have intentionally (or necessarily) tried
-to avoid.
-
-methods, engines, and evps
---------------------------
-
-There has been some dicussion, particularly with Steve, about where this
-ENGINE stuff might fit into the conceptual picture as/when we start to
-abstract algorithms a little bit to make the library more extensible. In
-particular, it would desirable to have algorithms (symmetric, hash, pkc,
-etc) abstracted in some way that allows them to be just objects sitting in
-a list (or database) ... it'll just happen that the "DSA" object doesn't
-support encryption whereas the "RSA" object does. This requires a lot of
-consideration to begin to know how to tackle it; in particular how
-encapsulated should these things be? If the objects also understand their
-own ASN1 encodings and what-not, then it would for example be possible to
-add support for elliptic-curve DSA in as a new algorithm and automatically
-have ECC-DSA certificates supported in SSL applications. Possible, but not
-easy. :-)
-
-Whatever, it seems that the way to go (if I've grok'd Steve's comments on
-this in the past) is to amalgamate these things in EVP as is already done
-(I think) for ciphers or hashes (Steve, please correct/elaborate). I
-certainly think something should be done in this direction because right
-now we have different source directories, types, functions, and methods
-for each algorithm - even when conceptually they are very much different
-feathers of the same bird. (This is certainly all true for the public-key
-stuff, and may be partially true for the other parts.)
-
-ENGINE was *not* conceived as a way of solving this, far from it. Nor was
-it conceived as a way of replacing the various "***_METHOD"s. It was
-conceived as an abstraction of a sort of "virtual crypto device". If we
-lived in a world where "EVP_ALGO"s (or something like them) encapsulated
-particular algorithms like RSA,DSA,MD5,RC4,etc, and "***_METHOD"s
-encapsulated interfaces to algorithms (eg. some algo's might support a
-PKC_METHOD, a HASH_METHOD, or a CIPHER_METHOD, who knows?), then I would
-think that ENGINE would encapsulate an implementation of arbitrarily many
-of those algorithms - perhaps as alternatives to existing algorithms
-and/or perhaps as new previously unimplemented algorithms. An ENGINE could
-be used to contain an alternative software implementation, a wrapper for a
-hardware acceleration and/or key-management unit, a comms-wrapper for
-distributing cryptographic operations to remote machines, or any other
-"devices" your imagination can dream up.
-
-However, what has been done in the ENGINE branch so far is nothing more
-than starting to get our toes wet. I had a couple of self-imposed
-requirements when putting the initial abstraction together, and I may have
-already posed these in one form or another on the list, but briefly;
-
-   (i) only bother with public key algorithms for now, and maybe RAND too
-       (motivated by the need to get hardware support going and the fact
-       this was a comparitively easy subset to address to begin with).
-
-  (ii) don't change (if at all possible) the existing crypto code, ie. the
-       implementations, the way the ***_METHODs work, etc.
-
- (iii) ensure that if no function from the ENGINE code is ever called then
-       things work the way they always did, and there is no memory
-       allocation (otherwise the failure to cleanup would be a problem -
-       this is part of the reason no STACKs were used, the other part of
-       the reason being I found them inappropriate).
-
-  (iv) ensure that all the built-in crypto was encapsulated by one of
-       these "ENGINE"s and that this engine was automatically selected as
-       the default.
-
-   (v) provide the minimum hooking possible in the existing crypto code
-       so that global functions (eg. RSA_public_encrypt) do not need any
-       extra parameter, yet will use whatever the current default ENGINE
-       for that RSA key is, and that the default can be set "per-key"
-       and globally (new keys will assume the global default, and keys
-       without their own default will be operated on using the global
-       default). NB: Try and make (v) conflict as little as possible with
-       (ii). :-)
-
-  (vi) wrap the ENGINE code up in duct tape so you can't even see the
-       corners. Ie. expose no structures at all, just black-box pointers.
-
-   (v) maintain internally a list of ENGINEs on which a calling
-       application can iterate, interrogate, etc. Allow a calling
-       application to hook in new ENGINEs, remove ENGINEs from the list,
-       and enforce uniqueness within the global list of each ENGINE's
-       "unique id".
-
-  (vi) keep reference counts for everything - eg. this includes storing a
-       reference inside each RSA structure to the ENGINE that it uses.
-       This is freed when the RSA structure is destroyed, or has its
-       ENGINE explicitly changed. The net effect needs to be that at any
-       time, it is deterministic to know whether an ENGINE is in use or
-       can be safely removed (or unloaded in the case of the other type
-       of reference) without invalidating function pointers that may or
-       may not be used indavertently in the future. This was actually
-       one of the biggest problems to overcome in the existing OpenSSL
-       code - implementations had always been assumed to be ever-present,
-       so there was no trivial way to get round this.
-
- (vii) distinguish between structural references and functional
-       references.
-
-A *little* detail
------------------
-
-While my mind is on it; I'll illustrate the bit in item (vii). This idea
-turned out to be very handy - the ENGINEs themselves need to be operated
-on and manipulated simply as objects without necessarily trying to
-"enable" them for use. Eg. most host machines will not have the necessary
-hardware or software to support all the engines one might compile into
-OpenSSL, yet it needs to be possible to iterate across the ENGINEs,
-querying their names, properties, etc - all happening in a thread-safe
-manner that uses reference counts (if you imagine two threads iterating
-through a list and one thread removing the ENGINE the other is currently
-looking at - you can see the gotcha waiting to happen). For all of this,
-*structural references* are used and operate much like the other reference
-counts in OpenSSL.
-
-The other kind of reference count is for *functional* references - these
-indicate a reference on which the caller can actually assume the
-particular ENGINE to be initialised and usable to perform the operations
-it implements. Any increment or decrement of the functional reference
-count automatically invokes a corresponding change in the structural
-reference count, as it is fairly obvious that a functional reference is a
-restricted case of a structural reference. So struct_ref >= funct_ref at
-all times. NB: functional references are usually obtained by a call to
-ENGINE_init(), but can also be created implicitly by calls that require a
-new functional reference to be created, eg. ENGINE_set_default(). Either
-way the only time the underlying ENGINE's "init" function is really called
-is when the (functional) reference count increases to 1, similarly the
-underlying "finish" handler is only called as the count goes down to 0.
-The effect of this, for example, is that if you set the default ENGINE for
-RSA operations to be "cswift", then its functional reference count will
-already be at least 1 so the CryptoSwift shared-library and the card will
-stay loaded and initialised until such time as all RSA keys using the
-cswift ENGINE are changed or destroyed and the default ENGINE for RSA
-operations has been changed. This prevents repeated thrashing of init and
-finish handling if the count keeps getting down as far as zero.
-
-Otherwise, the way the ENGINE code has been put together I think pretty
-much reflects the above points. The reason for the ENGINE structure having
-individual RSA_METHOD, DSA_METHOD, etc pointers is simply that it was the
-easiest way to go about things for now, to hook it all into the raw
-RSA,DSA,etc code, and I was trying to the keep the structure invisible
-anyway so that the way this is internally managed could be easily changed
-later on when we start to work out what's to be done about these other
-abstractions.
-
-Down the line, if some EVP-based technique emerges for adequately
-encapsulating algorithms and all their various bits and pieces, then I can
-imagine that "ENGINE" would turn into a reference-counting database of
-these EVP things, of which the default "openssl" ENGINE would be the
-library's own object database of pre-built software implemented algorithms
-(and such). It would also be cool to see the idea of "METHOD"s detached
-from the algorithms themselves ... so RSA, DSA, ElGamal, etc can all
-expose essentially the same METHOD (aka interface), which would include
-any querying/flagging stuff to identify what the algorithm can/can't do,
-its name, and other stuff like max/min block sizes, key sizes, etc. This
-would result in ENGINE similarly detaching its internal database of
-algorithm implementations from the function definitions that return
-interfaces to them. I think ...
-
-As for DSOs etc. Well the DSO code is pretty handy (but could be made much
-more so) for loading vendor's driver-libraries and talking to them in some
-generic way, but right now there's still big problems associated with
-actually putting OpenSSL code (ie. new ENGINEs, or anything else for that
-matter) in dynamically loadable libraries. These problems won't go away in
-a hurry so I don't think we should expect to have any kind of
-shared-library extensions any time soon - but solving the problems is a
-good thing to aim for, and would as a side-effect probably help make
-OpenSSL more usable as a shared-library itself (looking at the things
-needed to do this will show you why).
-
-One of the problems is that if you look at any of the ENGINE
-implementations, eg. hw_cswift.c or hw_ncipher.c, you'll see how it needs
-a variety of functionality and definitions from various areas of OpenSSL,
-including crypto/bn/, crypto/err/, crypto/ itself (locking for example),
-crypto/dso/, crypto/engine/, crypto/rsa, etc etc etc. So if similar code
-were to be suctioned off into shared libraries, the shared libraries would
-either have to duplicate all the definitions and code and avoid loader
-conflicts, or OpenSSL would have to somehow expose all that functionality
-to the shared-library. If this isn't a big enough problem, the issue of
-binary compatibility will be - anyone writing Apache modules can tell you
-that (Ralf? Ben? :-). However, I don't think OpenSSL would need to be
-quite so forgiving as Apache should be, so OpenSSL could simply tell its
-version to the DSO and leave the DSO with the problem of deciding whether
-to proceed or bail out for fear of binary incompatibilities.
-
-Certainly one thing that would go a long way to addressing this is to
-embark on a bit of an opaqueness mission. I've set the ENGINE code up with
-this in mind - it's so draconian that even to declare your own ENGINE, you
-have to get the engine code to create the underlying ENGINE structure, and
-then feed in the new ENGINE's function/method pointers through various
-"set" functions. The more of the code that takes on such a black-box
-approach, the more of the code that will be (a) easy to expose to shared
-libraries that need it, and (b) easy to expose to applications wanting to
-use OpenSSL itself as a shared-library. From my own explorations in
-OpenSSL, the biggest leviathan I've seen that is a problem in this respect
-is the BIGNUM code. Trying to "expose" the bignum code through any kind of
-organised "METHODs", let alone do all the necessary bignum operations
-solely through functions rather than direct access to the structures and
-macros, will be a massive pain in the "r"s.
-
-Anyway, I'm done for now - hope it was readable. Thoughts?
-
-Cheers,
-Geoff
-
-
------------------------------------==*==-----------------------------------
-