TLS Prober source code released under Apache 2.0 license

Three years ago, while a group, including myself, involved with work on the TLS Protocol, was discussing possible ways to solve the TLS Renego vulnerability that had been revealed a few months earlier, questions arose about the feasibility of some of the proposed measures. At that time, however, while we knew servers existed that would break if we did what was proposed, nobody had any real data about the *number* of deployed servers that would fail if such actions were taken.

I decided to take a look, to see if I could get some information about these issues.

In order to do so, I would need some kind of tool that would test TLS servers and report the results, and one fundamental part would be a TLS Protocol implementation. As I could not use Opera's own implementation, and I knew from experience just how long building one from scratch would take, I looked around for a Python-based TLS implementation that I could update as necessary for my purposes. I eventually settled on "TLSLite", a library that is available in the Public Domain, now also available on GitHub.

In the weeks and months that followed, the "TLS Prober" took shape as a system consisting of a database server and a number of machines that run tests on thousands of TLS servers and is today testing 550-600,000 TLS servers each week.

As a result, we have posted a number of articles here on the Security Group, as well as on my home page, with summaries of the data gathered by the TLS Prober.

Today, we are releasing the source code for the TLS Prober, and its associated "TLS Web Prober", a web service tool to do quick testing of TLS servers, under the Apache 2.0 License. The updated and instrumented TLSLite library is also being released, still under its original Public Domain license (but it has not been upgraded to the newer version mentioned above).

The database containing the results will not be released, as we are concerned that it could contain sensitive data about sites.

You can find the four git-repositories (repos) in Opera's GitHub area: TLSprober, TLSwebprober, TLScommon, TLSLite.


Additionally, we are releasing the "Git-splitter", a small Git-related tool that can be used to extract the files and commit history of a sub-directory in a Git repo, as well as reversing the process.

This tool became necessary for one of our internal projects, as some source code was shared across multiple projects, and normal migration back and forth was complicated. In order to improve the process, the system needed to be changed to use Git sub-modules instead. To do so, however, the relevant files and their commit history needed to be extracted from the original projects' source code.

Originally, we used a tool called git-subtree for this, but we encountered performance issues due to how git-subtree used temporary files. Therefore, I decided to write a similar tool in Python that eliminated those performance issues, as well as being able to reverse the process, since we also wanted to migrate any updates in the new sub-modules back to the original projects.

The result was the "Git-splitter", which is now available under the Apache 2.0 license in Opera's GitHub area.

Enjoy!