The so-called Heartbleed bug accidentally discloses part of the server memory contents, and thus can leak information that is not intended to be known by anyone else but the OpenSSL server. Private keys, passwords, anything stored in a memory region close to the one involved in the bug can potentially be transmitted back to an attacker.
This is serious. Dead serious. Hundreds of millions of affected machines serious. Thousands of million of password resets serious. Hundreds of thousands of SSL certificates renewed serious. Many, many man years of work serious. Patching and fixing this is going to cost real money, not to mention the undisclosed and potential damage arising from the use of the leaked information.
Yet the the bug can be reproduced in nine lines of code. That's all it takes to compromise a system.
Yet with all its dire consequences, the worst part around Heartbleed for me is what we're NOT learning from it. Here are a few of the wrong learnings that interested parties extract:
- Security "experts" : this is why you need security "experts", because you can't never be safe and you need their "expertise" to mitigate this and prevent such simple mistakes to surface and audit everything right and left and write security and risk assesment statements.
- Programmers: this Heartbleed bug happened because the programmer was not using memory allocator X, or framework Y, or programming language Z. Yes, all these could have prevented this mistake, yet none of them were used, or could be retrofitted easily into the existing codebase.
- Open Source opponents: this is what you get when you trust the Open Source mantra "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" Because in this case a severe bug was introduced without no one realizing that, hence you can't trust Open Source code.
In the well intentioned area we have the "Programmers" perspective. Yes, there are more secure frameworks and languages, yet no single programmer in his right mind would want want to rewrite something of this complexity caliber without at least a sizeable test case baseline to verify it. Where's that test case baseline? Who has to write it? Some programmer around there, I guess, yet no one seems to have bothered with it. In the decade or so that OpenSSL has been around. So these suggestions are similar to saying that you will not be involved in a car crash if you rebuild all roads so that they are safer. Not realistic.
Then we have the interested liars. Security "experts" were not seen anywhere during the two years that the bug has existed. None of them analyzed the code, assuming of course that they were qualified to even start understanding it. None of them had a clue that OpenSSL had a bug. Yet they descend like vultures on a dead carcass on this and other security incidents the demonstrate how necessary they are. Which in a way is true, they were necessary much earlier ago, when the bug was introduced. OpenSSL being open source means anyone at any time could have "audited" the code and highlighted all the flaws -of which there could be more of this kind- and raised all the alerts. None did that. Really, 99% of these "experts" are not qualified to do such a thing. All bugs are trivial when exposed, yet to expose them one needs code reading skills, test development skills and theoretical knowledge. Which is something not everyone has.
And we finally have in the deep end of the lies area we have the Open Source opponents perspective. Look at how this Open Source thing is all about a bunch of amateurs pretending that they can create professional level components that can be used by the industry in general. Because you know, commercial software is rigurously tested and has the backing support of commercial entities whose best interest is to deliver a product that works as expected.
And that is the most dangerous lie of all. Well intentioned programmers can propose unrealistic solutions, the "security" experts can parasite the IT industry a bit more but that creates at best inconvenience and at worst a false sense of security. But assuming that these kinds of problems will disappear using commercial software puts everyone in danger.
First, because all kind of sotfware has security flaws. Ever heard of patch Tuesday? Second, because when there is no source code, there is no way of auditing anything and you rely on trusting the vendor. And third, because the biggest OpenSSL users are precisely commercial entities.
However, as easy it is to say if after the fact, it remains true that there are ways of preventing future Heartbleed-class disasters: more testing, more tooling and more auditing could have prevented this. And do you know what is the prerequisite to do all these things? Resources. Currently the core OpenSSL team consists of ... two individuals. None of which are paid directly for development of OpenSSL. So the real root cause of Heartbleed is lack of money, because there could be a lot more people that could be auditing and crash proofing OpenSSL, if only they were paid to do it.
But ironically, it seems that there is plenty of money on some OpenSSL users, whose business relies heavily on a tool that allows to securely communicate over the Internet. Looking from this perspective, Heartbleed could have prevented if any of the commercial entities using OpenSSL had invested some resources on auditing or improving OpenSSL instead of profitting from it.
So the real root cause of Hearbleed lies in these entities taking away without giving back. And when you look at the list, boy, how they could have given back to OpenSSL. A lot. Akamai, Google, Yahoo, Dropbox, Cisco or Juniper, to name a few, have been using OpenSSL for years, benefitting from the package yet not giving back to the community some of what they got. So think twice before basing part of your commercial success on unpaid volunteer effort, because you may not have to pay for it at the beginning, but later on could bite you. A few hundred of millions of bites. And don't think that holding the source code secret you're doing it better, becase in fact you're doing it much worse.
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