Mbed TLS

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Mbed TLS is a C library that implements cryptographic primitives, X.509 certificate manipulation and the SSL/TLS and DTLS protocols. Its small code footprint makes it suitable for embedded systems.

Note

ESP-IDF uses a fork of Mbed TLS which includes a few patches (related to hardware routines of certain modules like bignum (MPI) and ECC) over vanilla Mbed TLS.

Mbed TLS supports TLS 1.2, TLS 1.3 and DTLS 1.2 communication by providing the following:

  • TCP/IP communication functions: listen, connect, accept, read/write.

  • SSL/TLS communication functions: init, handshake, read/write.

  • X.509 functions: CRT, CRL and key handling

  • Random number generation

  • Hashing

  • Encryption/decryption

Note

Mbed TLS v3.x.x series supports only TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3 protocols. Support for SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0/1.1 and DTLS 1.0 has been removed (deprecated). TLS 1.3 is fully supported starting Mbed TLS v3.6.0 release, before this release some features were still in experimental state. Please refer to Mbed TLS ChangeLog for more details.

Mbed TLS Documentation

For Mbed TLS documentation please refer to the following (upstream) pointers:

Mbed TLS Support in ESP-IDF

Please find the information about the Mbed TLS versions presented in different branches of ESP-IDF here.

Note

Please refer the Mbed TLS to migrate from Mbed TLS version 2.x to version 3.0 or greater.

Application Examples

Examples in ESP-IDF use ESP-TLS which provides a simplified API interface for accessing the commonly used TLS functionality.

Refer to the examples protocols/https_server/simple (Simple HTTPS server) and protocols/https_request (Make HTTPS requests) for more information.

If you plan to use the Mbed TLS API directly, refer to the example protocols/https_mbedtls. This example demonstrates how to establish an HTTPS connection using Mbed TLS by setting up a secure socket with a certificate bundle for verification.

Alternatives

ESP-TLS acts as an abstraction layer over the underlying SSL/TLS library and thus has an option to use Mbed TLS or wolfSSL as the underlying library. By default, only Mbed TLS is available and used in ESP-IDF whereas wolfSSL is available publicly at <https://github.com/espressif/esp-wolfSSL> with the upstream submodule pointer.

Please refer to ESP-TLS: Underlying SSL/TLS Library Options docs for more information on this and comparison of Mbed TLS and wolfSSL.

Important Config Options

Following is a brief list of important config options accessible at Component Config -> mbedTLS. The full list of config options can be found here.

Performance and Memory Tweaks

Reducing Heap Usage

The following table shows typical memory usage with different configs when the protocols/https_request example (with Server Validation enabled) was run with Mbed TLS as the SSL/TLS library.

Mbed TLS Test

Related Configs

Heap Usage (approx.)

Default

NA

42196 B

Enable SSL Variable Length

CONFIG_MBEDTLS_SSL_VARIABLE_BUFFER_LENGTH

42120 B

Disable Keep Peer Certificate

CONFIG_MBEDTLS_SSL_KEEP_PEER_CERTIFICATE

38533 B

Enable Dynamic TX/RX Buffer

CONFIG_MBEDTLS_DYNAMIC_BUFFER CONFIG_MBEDTLS_DYNAMIC_FREE_CONFIG_DATA CONFIG_MBEDTLS_DYNAMIC_FREE_CA_CERT

22013 B

Note

These values are subject to change with change in configuration options and versions of Mbed TLS.

Reducing Binary Size

Under Component Config -> mbedTLS, there are multiple Mbed TLS features which are enabled by default but can be disabled if not needed to save code size. More information can be about this can be found in Minimizing Binary Size docs.

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