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briansmith
ring
Assembly2015–2025
briansmith / ring

ring

An experiment.

Security & Privacy
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
31Distinct people
39Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
4.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

An experiment.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

Note that the readme is outdated. With the upcoming 0.17 release, which is in the making for almost a year already, you can link multiple versions of ring in one executable:…

est31 used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 9:28:18 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year39 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-09-23 00:31:02 UTC to 2025-02-08 05:21:05 UTC.

024682015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 1 submissions, 7 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC817
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND BRIAN SMITH AND THE AUTHORS DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL BRIAN SMITH OR THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE. Most of the C and assembly language code in ring comes from BoringSSL. BoringSSL is a fork of OpenSSL. This quote from the BoringSSL README.md discouraging you from using it applies to this project: BoringSSL is a fork of OpenSSL that is designed to meet Google's needs. Although BoringSSL is an open source project, it is not intended for general use, as OpenSSL is. We don't recommend that third parties depend upon it. This project was originally shared on GitHub in 2015 as an experiment. It was put on crates.io shortly to help other people with their experiments. It is an experiment. Side Channels See SIDE-CHANNELS.md for important information regarding the limitations of the side channel mitigations in this project. Toolchains & Targets Be especially wary about using toolchains (C compilers, etc.) or targets that aren't supported by other projects, especially BoringSSL. The further you are from using the same version of Clang that Chrome uses, the more wary you should be. Bug Reporting For security vulnerabilities, see https://github.com/briansmith/ring/security/policy. Please report bugs that aren't security vulnerabilities either as pull requests or as issues in the issue tracker. Release Notes It is recommended that you review every commit in this project. Some particularly noteworthy changes are noted in the RELEASES.md. We could use some help in making this better.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

3 sources
briansmith·Oct 19, 2015
> 5. People poo poo any alternative to OpenSSL because it's not 100% feature complete and besides the best crypto people are already working on OpenSSL so what do these schmucks know? Here's a strategy: Take OpenSSL, remove a bunch of stuff that almost nobody needs, rearrange the code to make it clearer. You will get BoringSSL. Take the BoringSSL code, remove more stuff that people outside of Google generally don't need. Temporarily remove the X.509 code and the TLS code so that you can remove even more stuff. Next, write bindings for the remaining code for a safe language like Rust, so that the replacement X.509 and TLS code can be written in the safer language, while still using the OpenSSL crypto code. Then, write the new X.509 code, focusing on what really is needed and ignoring all the extra cruft that was added to X.509 but which do
Read the rest
esn't actually improve security. Then, over time, refactor the the language bindings so more code is written in the safe language and less code is written in C, with the goal of almost all the code that isn't implementing directly crypto algorithms being in the safe language. Then, add a good, clean TLS implementation in the safe language, that focuses on the good parts of TLS, and that avoids all the legacy cruft that makes TLS seem complicated. I've been doing an experiment along these lines. I've open sourced two parts so far: 1. https://github.com/briansmith/ring 2. https://github.com/briansmith/webpki It is a big project, but I am pretty sure it is going to succeed.
In Qualys Security Advisory – LibreSSL

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