OpenSSL's New Alpha Build Speeds Up Post-Quantum Crypto
Help Net Security, Thursday, September 10th, 2026
OpenSSL 4.1.0 alpha1 adds DTLS 1.3 support and faster post-quantum ML-DSA and ML-KEM operations in an early test release.
The OpenSSL project released the first alpha of OpenSSL 4.1.0, months ahead of general availability. The headline addition is DTLS 1.3 support per RFC 9147, bringing UDP-based traffic such as VPNs, video calls and IoT up to the TLS 1.3 security baseline.
The build speeds up post-quantum ML-DSA and ML-KEM on ppc64le, s390x and x86_64, including AVX-512 acceleration. Breaking changes include a new Perl dependency for tsget, dropped Windows-on-Itanium and Windows CE support and removal of no-ecdsa and no-ecdh options; GREASE and IKEv2 KDF support were also added.