The OpenSSL Management Committee and the OpenSSL Technical Committee are glad to announce the alpha release of OpenSSL 3.1.

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 a beta release will be issued to add more functionality, polish and improve the code and fix issues.

OpenSSL 3.1 is the next minor release of OpenSSL that is currently in development, and represents a performance improvement and FIPS 140-3 validation preparation. We’ve been talking about this for a while in this blog post FIPS 140-3 Plans. And also at the ICMC conference Presentation at ICMC22.

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 project.

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.

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