About

Kore (https://kore.io) is a web application platform for writing scalable, concurrent web based processes in C or Python.

It is built with a "secure by default" approach. It is fully privilege separated while using strong security features at the operating system level such as seccomp, pledge, unveil and more.

Today Kore is used in a variety of applications ranging from high assurance cryptographic devices, machine-learning stacks and even in the aerospace industry.

From embedded platforms all the way to high performance servers. Kore scales.

Key Features

• Supports SNI
• Supports HTTP/1.1
• Websocket support
• Privseps by default
• TLS enabled by default
• Optional background tasks
• Built-in parameter validation
• Optional asynchronous PostgreSQL support
• Optional support for page handlers in Python
• Reload private keys and certificates on-the-fly
• Automatic X509 certificates via ACME (with privsep)
• Private keys isolated in separate process (RSA and ECDSA)
• Default sane TLS ciphersuites (PFS in all major browsers)
• Modules can be reloaded on-the-fly, even while serving content
• Worker processes sandboxed on OpenBSD (pledge) and Linux (seccomp)
• Event driven (epoll/kqueue) architecture with per CPU worker processes
• Build your web application as a precompiled dynamic library or single binary

And lots more.

License

• Kore is licensed under the ISC license

Documentation

Read the documentation

Performance

Read the benchmarks blog post.

Platforms supported

• Linux
• OpenBSD
• FreeBSD
• MacOS

Kore only supports x64, arm and aarch64 architectures.

Building Kore

Clone this repository or get the latest release at https://kore.io/releases/4.2.2.

Requirements

• openssl 1.1.1 or libressl 3.x (note: openssl 3.0.0 is currently not supported)

Requirement for asynchronous curl (optional)

• libcurl (7.64.0 or higher)

Requirements for background tasks (optional)

• pthreads

Requirements for pgsql (optional)

• libpq

Requirements for python (optional)

• Python 3.6+

Normal compilation and installation:

$ cd kore
$ make
# make install

If you would like to build a specific flavor, you can enable those by setting a shell environment variable before running make.

• ACME=1 (compiles in ACME support)
• CURL=1 (compiles in asynchronous curl support)
• TASKS=1 (compiles in task support)
• PGSQL=1 (compiles in pgsql support)
• DEBUG=1 (enables use of -d for debug)
• NOHTTP=1 (compiles Kore without HTTP support)
• NOOPT=1 (disable compiler optimizations)
• JSONRPC=1 (compiles in JSONRPC support)
• PYTHON=1 (compiles in the Python support)
• TLS_BACKEND=none (compiles Kore without any TLS backend)

Note that certain build flavors cannot be mixed together and you will just be met with compilation errors.

Example applications

You can find example applications under examples/.

The examples contain a README file with instructions on how to build or use them.

Mailing lists

patches@kore.io - Send patches here, preferably inline.

users@kore.io - Questions regarding kore.

If you want to signup to those mailing lists send an empty email to listname+subscribe@kore.io

Other mailboxes (these are not mailing lists):

security@kore.io - Mail this email if you think you found a security problem.

sponsor@kore.io - If your company would like to sponsor part of Kore development.

More information can be found on https://kore.io/