OpenSSL Conference 2025 - Nicky Mouha - The Road from Academic Research to OpenSSL Contributions

In this talk, I will discuss my OpenSSL contributions. My first contribution involves a potentially vulnerable code pattern that is the root cause of CVE-2022-37454, a buffer overflow vulnerability in the "official" SHA-3 implementation (Mouha and Celi, CT-RSA 2023). Jaroslav Lobačevski of GitHub Security Lab found the same pattern in OpenSSL, specifically in its HKDF implementation. (HKDF, which stands for HMAC-based Key Derivation Function, is used in TLS 1.3, the protocol that keeps your browser connection secure.) My second contribution is related to OpenSSL issue #13210 ("Incorrect usage of the HMAC APIs"), which discusses an attack when HMAC_Update() is invoked after HMAC_Final() (Benmocha et al., SAC 2020). It surprised me that the attack is no longer possible since OpenSSL 3.2.0 due to a change in the HMAC API, and I proposed adding a regression test to document the new API behavior.

📚 Slides & materials:
Presentation: https://archive.openssl-conference.or...

This session was recorded at the OpenSSL Conference 2025 in Prague, the annual global meetup of cryptographers, open-source developers, security engineers, and practitioners working with TLS, PKI, and secure communications.

📍 Event: OpenSSL Conference 2025, Prague
📅 Date: October 7-9 2025

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