OpenSSL is a robust, commercial-grade, full-featured Open Source Toolkit for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol formerly known as the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol. The protocol implementation is based on a full-strength general purpose cryptographic library, which can also be used stand-alone.

OpenSSL is descended from the SSLeay library developed by Eric A. Young and Tim J. Hudson.

The official Home Page of the OpenSSL Project is www.openssl.org.

Overview

The OpenSSL toolkit includes:

libssl an implementation of all TLS protocol versions up to TLSv1.3 (RFC 8446).
libcrypto a full-strength general purpose cryptographic library. It constitutes the basis of the TLS implementation, but can also be used independently.
openssl the OpenSSL command line tool, a swiss army knife for cryptographic tasks, testing and analyzing. It can be used for
- creation of key parameters
- creation of X.509 certificates, CSRs and CRLs
- calculation of message digests
- encryption and decryption
- SSL/TLS client and server tests
- handling of S/MIME signed or encrypted mail
- and more...