openssl/openssl

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

30985 stars · 11530 forks observed · 2026-10-19

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-10-05, confidence 0.99

OpenSSL is a robust, commercial‑grade cryptographic toolkit written in C. It provides a full‑featured implementation of TLS/SSL, DTLS, QUIC and a general‑purpose crypto library.

Use cases

• establish secure HTTPS connections for web servers
• generate X.509 certificates and certificate signing requests
• encrypt and decrypt files or messages using AES and other algorithms
• verify digital signatures on code or documents
• perform TLS handshake testing and debugging
• create and process S/MIME encrypted email
• implement DTLS communication for IoT devices
• use the command‑line tool for quick cryptographic operations

When to choose

• When you need a battle‑tested, widely‑adopted cryptographic library with extensive protocol support.
• When FIPS‑validated cryptography is required for compliance.
• When developing C or C++ applications that need direct TLS/SSL integration.
• When you want a powerful command‑line utility for ad‑hoc crypto tasks.

When to avoid

• If you prefer a pure‑Rust or Go implementation without external C dependencies.
• When you need GPU‑accelerated cryptography or specialized hardware support not provided by OpenSSL.
• If licensing constraints prevent use of Apache‑2.0 in your project.

Facets

library · maturity active

cryptography security networking web-development windows bsd c cli tls ssl crypto fips openssl command-line encryption decryption x509 certificate linux macos

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