Hi, I have been working with Mbed TLS for the last 6 months in an extremely low memory use case. This library has been an absolute joy to work with because of how flexible it is. I have an interesting use case with how little RAM I have to work with (around 6kb on one microprocessor) and I have made some changes that I thought would be of interest. I'm not sure if I should submit them as a single changeset or a set of changes. I'll describe the changes and if there is interest I can clean them up for submission.
The first change that I made was for a scenario with two microprocessors communicating over a UART. I was already using TLS offloading so that the private key was on one processor (with only 6kb of RAM free) and the SSL context stored on the other. I required generating a CSR and thus made some changes to the CSR code to be able to generate the CSR using a similar private key offloading strategy.
I found an issue with downloading firmware for OTA from openssl web servers. This is a little tricky to describe. The server was not responsive to requests for reducing the max fragment length, which forced me to use MBEDTLS_SSL_MAX_CONTENT_LEN set to 16384. But I needed to have multiple ssl sessions open for other activities and did not have enough RAM to hold multiple large buffers. I have made a set of changes to allow setting the content length when the ssl context is initialized, as well as setting different IN and OUT content lengths to save memory. This change allowed me to set up one session with 16kb for the IN content length, and then 4kb for OUT content length, while a second session could use 2kb for a total of 24kb instead of 64kb.
Related to the openssl issue, I found that the incoming ssl packet header length can sometimes be 8 or 16 bytes larger than expected depending on which AES method is selected. I'm not actually sure what the best way to solve this is. One way may be to change MBEDTLS_SSL_HEADER_LEN from 13 to 29 bytes. However I ended up solving it by adding 16 to both MBEDTLS_SSL_IN_BUFFER_LEN and MBEDTLS_SSL_OUT_BUFFER_LEN. This way I could handle the larger ssl header as well as receive the content body.
If these three changes sound interesting I can start work on cleaning up the code to be less specific to my company and then submit the changes. Also I would like to know if there is any process I should be following when submitting these changes.
Thanks,
Nick Setzer SimpliSafe, Inc. 294 Washington Street, 9th Floor Boston, MA 02108