It is surprising that a project that is quite mission critical is completely at the bottom of the scale when it comes to how much the development process is oriented toward reliability. There are no systematic unit tests, no systematic documentation, the best you get is a bunch of disorganized integration tests, so it is not even at the level you would expect for a decently maintained business project: https://github.com/openssl/openssl
Perhaps the open source model of development is just not very good for software of this kind. Of course it's good that the source is open for everyone to look and potentially contribute, but without funding and without having a real process and a full time team it seems to me it is hard to get the level of quality required.
I also wonder how much in the end the big institutions care about this stuff. Intel hires a bunch of guys to do formal models of their processors to ensure bugs aren't shipped to millions of customers, why is nobody funding a formally specified version of SSL? For other mission critical systems, like what goes into spacecrafts, or hospitals, or gets developed in the military there are rigorous processes in use to prevent stupid mistakes, so it's somewhat disappointing that the major infrastructure pieces don't receive this kind of treatment.
Perhaps the open source model of development is just not very good for software of this kind. Of course it's good that the source is open for everyone to look and potentially contribute, but without funding and without having a real process and a full time team it seems to me it is hard to get the level of quality required.
I also wonder how much in the end the big institutions care about this stuff. Intel hires a bunch of guys to do formal models of their processors to ensure bugs aren't shipped to millions of customers, why is nobody funding a formally specified version of SSL? For other mission critical systems, like what goes into spacecrafts, or hospitals, or gets developed in the military there are rigorous processes in use to prevent stupid mistakes, so it's somewhat disappointing that the major infrastructure pieces don't receive this kind of treatment.