Heartbleed

Heartbleed is a security bug in the OpenSSL cryptography library, which is a widely used implementation of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. It was introduced into the software in 2012 and publicly disclosed in April 2014. Heartbleed may be exploited regardless of whether the party is using a vulnerable OpenSSL instance for TLS as a server or a client. It results from improper input validation (due to a missing bounds check) in the implementation of the TLS heartbeat extension, thus the bug's name derives from heartbeat. The vulnerability is classified as a buffer over-read, a situation where more data can be read than should be allowed.

Heartbleed is registered in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database as CVE-2014-0160. The federal Canadian Cyber Incident Response Centre issued a security bulletin advising system administrators about the bug. A fixed version of OpenSSL was released on April 7, 2014, on the same day Heartbleed was publicly disclosed.

As of May 20, 2014^[update], 1.5% of the 800,000 most popular TLS-enabled websites were still vulnerable to Heartbleed.

TLS implementations other than OpenSSL, such as GnuTLS, Mozilla's Network Security Services, and the Windows platform implementation of TLS, were not affected because the defect existed in the OpenSSL's implementation of TLS rather than in the protocol itself.

The Heartbeat Extension for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) protocols was proposed as a standard in February 2012 by RFC 6520. It provides a way to test and keep alive secure communication links without the need to renegotiate the connection each time. In 2011, one of the RFC's authors, Robin Seggelmann, then a Ph.D. student at the Fachhochschule Münster, implemented the Heartbeat Extension for OpenSSL. Following Seggelmann's request to put the result of his work into OpenSSL, his change was reviewed by Stephen N. Henson, one of OpenSSL's four core developers. Henson failed to notice a bug in Seggelmann's implementation, and introduced the flawed code into OpenSSL's source code repository on December 31, 2011. The flaw spread with the release of OpenSSL version 1.0.1 on March 14, 2012. Heartbeat support was enabled by default, causing affected versions to be vulnerable.

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