Crosscompiling Oscam for OpenPLi (Vu Zero 4k/ARM)

I've been searching around for a smoother way to crosscompile Oscam so that it runs on the latest OpenPLi, in particular for my STB (which is a Vu+ Zero 4K). I have done this in the past for an entirely different mipsel receiver. Being completely honest, I don't really have my Vu Zero 4k yet (it's still shipping), so all my assumptions about the toolkit are made by manually inspecting the latest release zips.

I have tried cloning the Oscam repo, properly configured it (barebones without webif or SSL), and used the latest release of stbgcc-6.3 to try to crosscompile. Unlike the toolkit I had used for mipsel, the stbgcc-6.3 does not have headers/stubs for openssl -- which causes the crosscompile to fail (see the output bellow).

There are a few crude ways to work-around this (ie., compile my own version of libraries with stbgcc-6.3 and statically link them in the binary), however I would like to humbly ask what is the proper way to crosscompile Oscam so that it runs on latest OpenPLi.

user@host:/home/build/oscam-vu$ make CROSS=/home/build/stbgcc-6.3-1.6/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf- CC_OPTS="-mcpu=cortex-a15 -O2"
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| OSCam ver: 1.20_svn rev: 11518 target: arm-linux-gnueabihf
| Tools:
|  CROSS    = /home/build/stbgcc-6.3-1.6/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-
|  CC       = /home/build/stbgcc-6.3-1.6/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc
| Settings:
|  CONF_DIR = /usr/local/etc
|  CC_OPTS  = -mcpu=cortex-a15 -O2
|  CC_WARN  = -W -Wall -Wshadow -Wredundant-decls -Wstrict-prototypes -Wold-style-definition
|  CFLAGS   =
|  LDFLAGS  = -Wl,--gc-sections
|  LIBS     = -lm -lpthread -ldl
|  UseFlags =
| Config:
|  Addons   : HAVE_DVBAPI IRDETO_GUESSING
|  Protocols: CCCAM
|  Readers  : NAGRA NAGRA_MERLIN IRDETO CONAX CRYPTOWORKS SECA VIACCESS VIDEOGUARD
|  CardRdrs : INTERNAL
|  Compiler : arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc (crosstool-NG ) 6.3.0
|  Config   : build/arm-linux-gnueabihf/config.mak
|  Binary   : Distribution/oscam-1.20_svn11518-arm-linux-gnueabihf
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CC      cscrypt/aes.c
CC      cscrypt/bn_add.c
CC      cscrypt/bn_asm.c
CC      cscrypt/bn_ctx.c
CC      cscrypt/bn_div.c
CC      cscrypt/bn_exp.c
CC      cscrypt/bn_lib.c
CC      cscrypt/bn_mul.c
CC      cscrypt/bn_print.c
CC      cscrypt/bn_shift.c
CC      cscrypt/bn_sqr.c
CC      cscrypt/bn_word.c
CC      cscrypt/mem.c
CC      cscrypt/des.c
CC      cscrypt/i_cbc.c
CC      cscrypt/i_ecb.c
CC      cscrypt/i_skey.c
CC      cscrypt/md5.c
CC      cscrypt/rc6.c
CC      cscrypt/sha1.c
CC      cscrypt/mdc2.c
In file included from cscrypt/mdc2.c:3:0:
cscrypt/mdc2.h:62:25: fatal error: openssl/des.h: No such file or directory
 #include <openssl/des.h>
                         ^
compilation terminated.
make[1]: *** [Makefile:423: build/arm-linux-gnueabihf/cscrypt/mdc2.o] Error 1
make: *** [Makefile:376: all] Error 2