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aw1621107 41 minutes ago

> And since then we have an NSA employee co-authoring the paper which led to Heartbleed

I'm confused as to what "the paper which led to Heartbleed" means. A paper proposing/describing the heartbeat extension? A paper proposing its implementation in OpenSSL? A paper describing the bug/exploit? Something else?

And in addition to that, is there any connection between that author and the people who actually wrote the relevant (buggy) OpenSSL code? If the people who wrote the bug were entirely unrelated to the people authoring the paper then it's not clear to me why any blame should be placed on the paper authors.

timschmidt 34 minutes ago | parent [-]

> I'm confused

The original paper which proposed the OpenSSL Heartbeat extension was written by two people, one worked for NSA and one was a student at the time who went on to work for BND, the "German NSA". The paper authors also wrote the extension.

I know this because when it happened, I wanted to know who was responsible for making me patch all my servers, so I dug through the OpenSSL patch stream to find the authors.

tptacek 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

What does that paper say about implementing the TLS Heartbeat extension with a trivial uninitialized buffer bug?

timschmidt a minute ago | parent [-]

About as much as Jia Tan said about implementing the XZ backdoor via an inconspicuous typo in a Make file. What's your point?

aw1621107 31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Ah, that clears up the confusion. Thank you for taking the time to explain!