The OpenSSL Management Committee and the OpenSSL Technical Committee are glad to announce the second alpha release of OpenSSL 3.0.

As any alpha release, the code is still experimental and many things can still change before the feature freeze planned for the beta release. In the following weeks more alpha releases will be issued to add more functionality, polish and improve the code and fix issues.

We have been talking about the development of the next major release of OpenSSL for a while, and you can read more about it in previous blog posts and read more about the planned changes in our design document.

For the lovers of statistics, in the 3 weeks since the first alpha pre-release, 582 files were changed, with 12867 insertions and 4717 deletions! Among these changes, we can mention:

• general improvements to the built-in providers, the providers API and the internal plumbing;
• the removal of legacy API functions related to FIPS mode, replaced by new provider-based mechanisms;
• the addition of a new cmp app for RFC 4210;
• extended and improved test coverage;
• improvements to the documentations;
• fixes for various issues.

In announcing this new pre-release, we particularly wish to thank the community for the great response to the previous alpha. Many of the issues fixed and the other improvements have been possible thanks to the feedback and the contributions sent by all the users and developers that heeded the previous announcements or regularly follow development on the git master branch, and helped with the testing.

On a personal author note, the level and quality of engagement from the whole community since the previous pre-release has been astonishing, and I’d like to take advantage of this blog post also to personally and explicitly thank all the new first-time contributors that started collaborating with the OpenSSL Project in the past weeks!

Resuming with the announcement and the useful information: once more, we invite the OpenSSL community to download and test this alpha release to provide early feedback, prioritizing GitHub issues and pull requests as the favourite channel for contributing to the OpenSSL 3.0 project.

For more details on upgrading to OpenSSL 3.0 from previous versions, as well as known issues and the status of current development, we collected specific notes on the OpenSSL wiki. We strongly encourage consulting (and contributing to) this wiki entry also to discover the most important changes in the upcoming OpenSSL 3.0 and how they might affect you and the code you maintain.

We are always keen to see oldtimers and newcomers alike proposing issues, fixes and contributions, not only in the form of code, but also for manpages and wiki documentation. At this point, it is particularly important to also make sure that the documentation for the new architecture, for the new features, and for the new deprecations and their replacements, is available, complete, up-to-date and sufficiently clear for external users.

The feedback from the community, and your involvement in testing external applications and ENGINEs against the next version of OpenSSL and improving the documentation is crucial to the continued quality of the OpenSSL Project.