BoringSSL

BoringSSL is a fork of the OpenSSL cryptographic library maintained by Google. It originated around 2014 as an effort to simplify OpenSSL, remove legacy features, and improve security and maintainability for Google's products. The project provides a TLS/SSL implementation and crypto primitives, typically exposed as the libssl and libcrypto components used by Google's software stack.

The design goals emphasize security, correctness, and code quality. BoringSSL refactors and removes much of the legacy OpenSSL code, adopts modern development practices, and uses extensive auditing, testing, and fuzzing. The API surface is similar to OpenSSL in parts but has diverged, and it is not guaranteed to be API compatible with OpenSSL releases. It is intended for use with projects that explicitly adopt BoringSSL rather than as a general drop-in replacement for OpenSSL.

In practice, BoringSSL is the TLS backend for Google products such as Chrome, Android, and Fuchsia. It is also available as a standalone library for internal use, but external adoption is limited compared to OpenSSL. Google maintains the project, with the goal of keeping a compact, auditable code base and enabling rapid security fixes.

Licensing and distribution follow Google’s policy for BoringSSL; the code is released under a permissive license compatible with Google’s ecosystem. The project emphasizes that developers should rely on OpenSSL or BoringSSL depending on their platform requirements, and avoid assuming full compatibility between the two.