Milkyway: Planned Deprecation of TLS 1.0/1.1

To Sum Up: Older machines/BOINC clients may encounter issues after 12/17/2021. In order to prevent this, update your BOINC client to at least 7.210 by then, as well as your OpenSSL and curl libraries if necessary.

Hey Everyone,

We recently renewed the cert for the server, and we realized that the server is still supporting TLS 1.0/1.1. These services are out of date and are security hazards. We are going to end support for these services as of Friday, December 17, 2021.

What does this mean for you as a user?

Older clients may still be using old versions of SSL that need TLS 1.0 or 1.1. Once we stop supporting these services, these older clients may encounter issues when trying to communicate and/or get work from the MilkyWay@home server. In order to prevent this, you should update to at least the 7.210 BOINC client.

Additionally, some libraries rely on old versions of TLS. The most common of these are old versions of OpenSSL and curl. If you are running old versions of these libraries, it may be time to update them. Other libraries might also cause issues, so we will keep track of any problems that people run into here.

Overall these issues are relatively easy to fix and should only impact older systems, especially those that have not updated their libraries or BIONC clinets in a long time.

Best,
Tom

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