When I wrote about the GnuTLS bug, I said that this isn’t the last severe TLS stack bug we’d see. I didn’t expect it to be quite this bad, however.
The Heartbleed bug is a particularly nasty bug. It allows an attacker to read up to 64KB of memory, and the security researchers have said:
Without using any privileged information or credentials we were able steal from ourselves the secret keys used for our X.509 certificates, user names and passwords, instant messages, emails and business critical documents and communication.
How could this happen? Let’s read the code and find out. (more…)