Response to GnuTLS in Exim Debate

Marc Haber blogs about GnuTLS in Exim4, and it suggests there is a long list of technical issues in GnuTLS. Given my involvement in GnuTLS, I decided to analyze each bug to see what we can learn and possibly improve.

I looked at the all bugs tagged with gnutls in the exim4 bug tracker. My impression is that Marc Haber has done a very good job as Exim4 maintainer in dealing with these GnuTLS related problems. Some of the frustration seems to be because submitters don’t respond to questions. Also it seems different problems are discussed at the same time, which makes it very difficult to help isolate and solve the problem. The only serious problem I’ve identified is the entropy depletion problem, and the GnuTLS team will try to address it. To me, the concern seems more of a volunteer time issue than a technical one.

Quick Summary

Bug #348046 is so complex that I cannot judge it. If the submitters are willing, it may be best to re-submit each problem separately. The problem with TheBat is interesting, but given the non-free status of TheBat and no other reports, it doesn’t seem serious. To reduce entropy consumption is something we should work on, but it is a ‘wishlist’ kind of bug, and to some extent may have already been solved by removing the DH generation code which depleats the entropy pool quickly. The rest appears to be already solved or should be tagged as ‘wontfix’.
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