MatrixSSL is an open source and commercial project that has been designed to provide embedded SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) implementations for small footprint devices and applications.

With under 50KB total footprint, the software includes SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) 3.0 client/sever support, TLS (Transport Layer Security) 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 client/server support, a cryptographic library that implements the RSA, AES, MD5, SHA1, 3DES, ECC, ARC4, and RC2 encryption algorithms.

MatrixSSL provides various cipher suites, CRL (Certificate Revocation List) support, session cipher renegotiation and re-keying, X.509 certificate chain authentication, as well as optimizations for the assembly language, supporting Intel, MIPS and ARM platforms.

Among other interesting features, we can mention complete support for session caching and resumption, Stateless Session Tickets support, Server Name Indication support, RFC7301 Application Protocol Negotiation, and RSASSA-PSS Signature Algorithm support.

Another interesting feature is the ability to parse ASN.1 DER and X.509 .pem certificates. The project also supports PKCS#12, PKCS#5, PKCS#1.5 and PKCS#8 for key formatting, supports SSH (Secure Shell) command-line, supports DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security), provides pluggable cipher suite, crypto provider, perating system and malloc interfaces, supports TCP/IP, and offers both end-user and developer documentation.

To install the MatrixSSL software on your GNU/Linux operating system, download the latest release from the project’s website (see the homepage link at the end of the review), save it somewhere on your computer, and unpack it.

Open a terminal emulator app, go to the location where you’ve extracted the archive file (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/matrixssl-3-7-1-open - replace ‘softpedia’ with your username), run the ‘make’ command to compile the program, and then run the ‘sudo make install’ command to install it.