Forums / Support / Ssl

Ssl

by alamo @
Any plans to support SSL (encrypted connections) in BinaryBoy? Several newsgroup providers are offering them, including Giganews. They claim SSL can in some cases even improve your speed, if your ISP is doing traffic shaping on NNTP connections.

Just curious, I've never used it and if I wanted to I think maybe I could run OpenSSL and launch BB from it, but I don't know if that would really work. Intrinsic support would be more convenient in any case. I have no idea how complicated it would be to implement support using the freely available toolkits.
 

BinaryBoy's reply to alamo #1757 @

I haven't looked into it too thoroughly. I'll consider it though. A lot of the SSL libraries are Open Source, which means BB can't use them. There's probably a reasonably priced commercial version around somewhere though.
 

alamo's reply to BinaryBoy #1769 @

Try http://www.openssl.org/

This is the only one I know of, don't know if it is all you need or not. It appears from the license that it's not GPL and there is no reason you couldn't use it in BB, there is no requirement to distribute source or make the product freely distributable.

The OpenSSL Project is a collaborative effort to develop a robust, commercial-grade, full-featured, and Open Source toolkit implementing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2/v3) and Transport Layer Security (TLS v1) protocols as well as a full-strength general purpose cryptography library. The project is managed by a worldwide community of volunteers that use the Internet to communicate, plan, and develop the OpenSSL toolkit and its related documentation.

OpenSSL is based on the excellent SSLeay library developed by Eric A. Young and Tim J. Hudson. The OpenSSL toolkit is licensed under an Apache-style licence, which basically means that you are free to get and use it for commercial and non-commercial purposes subject to some simple license conditions.


Licensing is also discussed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSL
 

BinaryBoy's reply to alamo #1770 @

Interesting. I was always under the impression OpenSSL was GPLed. The "Open" name threw me off. I'll look into this.
 

BinaryBoy's reply to BinaryBoy #1772 @

Do you have access to an SSL news server right now? If so, does it require you to connect to a special port (563) or does it say to connect to port 119?

I sort of have SSL working in 2.0 for servers that use port 563. Using SSL on standard port 119 takes a few extra steps but I can't work on that until I find a server to test it on.

The SSL build might be uploaded tomorrow.
 

alamo's reply to BinaryBoy #1775 @

Do you have access to an SSL news server right now? If so, does it require you to connect to a special port (563) or does it say to connect to port 119?

I sort of have SSL working in 2.0 for servers that use port 563. Using SSL on standard port 119 takes a few extra steps but I can't work on that until I find a server to test it on.

The SSL build might be uploaded tomorrow.


Yes, my ISP's FAQ says I can use SSL on port 563 (they outsource to Giganews). I'll be happy to test it for you. I see you just posted it to the 2.0 thread, I'll try to test it later tonight.
 

BinaryBoy's reply to alamo #1776 @

Yes, my ISP's FAQ says I can use SSL on port 563 (they outsource to Giganews). I'll be happy to test it for you. I see you just posted it to the 2.0 thread, I'll try to test it later tonight.


Thanks. My ISP uses Giganews too but apparently didn't opt for the SSL service. If all else fails, I'll have to sign up for a month and tweak it from there.

If anyone knows of a news server that uses SSL on port 119 (the standard news port), please let me know. This is the new standard way to use SSL with Usenet and it's a bit different from the port 563 method so it needs to be tested separately.
 

alamo's reply to BinaryBoy #1777 @

Unfortunately I can't help test much, 2.0 doesn't seem to work very well for me. The only thing in 2.0 which I can get to work reliably (on a normal server, not SSL) is getting a list of groups. I did once get search results, but could never download.

So to try to test SSL as much as I could, after getting a list of groups (non-SSL but using the server which supports SSL to verify the login credentials) I shut down BB2 and restarted it and entered the same server but with port 563. I then clicked refresh in the grouplist editor and it did create a file in My Documents which seems to be a grouplist. I tried this three times and only once did it get all the groups though, it was truncated the other two times. In all three cases the program then exited immediately with an application error.

As I said, BB2 doesn't work much for me in the first place so don't assume there's a problem with SSL. Sorry.
 

BinaryBoy's reply to alamo #1778 @

Thanks for the info. Guess I'll sign up for a month.

If you'd like, you could create a log so I could see where the crash is happening. To create a log, run BB2 from Start | Run like this: binboy2.exe -log BB2 will store the log in My Documents/Binary Boy 2/Logs/log.txt