> 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.

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tptacek 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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timschmidt an hour ago | parent [-]

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

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tptacek an hour ago | parent [-]

I'm asking what the paper has to do with the vulnerability. Can you answer that? Right now your claim basically comes down to "writing about CMake is evidence you backdoored CMake".

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timschmidt an hour ago | parent [-]

> Right now your claim basically comes down to "writing about CMake is evidence you backdoored CMake".

This statement makes it clear to me that you don't understand a thing I've said, and that you don't have the necessary background knowledge of Heartbleed, the XZ backdoor, or concepts such a plausible deniability to engage in useful conversation about any of them. Else you would not be so confused.

Please do some reading on all three. And if you want to have a conversation afterwards, feel free to make a comment which demonstrates a deeper understanding of the issues at hand.

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tptacek an hour ago | parent [-]

Sorry, you're not going to be able to bluster your way through this. What part of the paper you're describing instructed implementers of the TLS Heartbeat extension to copy data into an uninitialized buffer and then transmit it on the wire?

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timschmidt an hour ago | parent [-]

> What part of the paper you're describing instructed implementers of the TLS Heartbeat extension to copy data into an uninitialized buffer and then transmit it on the wire?

That's a very easy question to answer: the implementation the authors provided alongside it.

If you expect authors of exploits to clearly explain them to you, you are not just ignorant of the details of backdoors like the one in XZ (CMake was never backdoored, a "typo" in a CMake file bootstrapped the exploit in XZ builds), but are naive to an implausible degree about the activities of exploit authors.

Even the University of Minnesota did not publicly state "we're going to backdoor the Linux kernel" before they attempted to do so: https://cyberir.mit.edu/site/how-university-got-itself-banne...

If you tell someone you're going to build an exploit and how, the obvious response will be "no, we won't allow you to." So no exploit author does that.

	▲	tptacek an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Which "paper" are you referring to?

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aw1621107 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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