Heartbleed bug

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Some interesting comments from http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2602816:

It's true - the OpenSSL codebase is a gigantic mess, which is directly what allowed a rather obvious bug to persist in code for over 2 years before being discovered.

Persisting memory allocations isn't the problem, though. Heap persistence is absolutely necessary in any code designed for high-performance and scalability, and OpenSSL is required to scale well past whatever application running behind it can do. The problem is that the code contribution failed to do input sanitization - which is a fundamental security practice.

The tools that we use at my company that have high-security requirements don't run on OpenSSL for exactly this reason. I'd love to switch everything over to NSS, but unfortunately that's not really practical.

You can't blame individual developers for the state of the codebase as a whole. There is no organization backing OpenSSL and driving standards - it's just a bunch of people who hack the codebase to do what they need it to. There is no Linus or Theo maintaining the project, and no RedHat or SuSE sponsoring it to make sure code reviews get done.

Ultimately, it's the implementers' fault for trusting the OpenSSL codebase to be secure, not contributing enough to the project to ensure it has the resources to do security audits, and not doing their own vulnerability assessments on the code.

It is quite common for amateurs in security to come with very bad solutions to problems even though they are often well-meaning. There are numerous cases of people inventing encryption methods that are easily broken. I've seen people do nothing more than invert the bits and claim that the "encrypted" message was secure.

The worst I ever saw was some bozo who didn't consider any computer system secure until he had disabled or removed everything having to do with security.

One time the bozo set up a firewall for us, but it never got used because whenever it was plugged in, it shut down all traffic. The reason was simple -- he thought that the proper way to plug it in was backwards -- that the Internet was the LAN and the local network was the WAN. One day, long after the bozo was gone, I found a listing of the firewall rules he used. It turned out that all the firewall did was filter out spoofed traffic and pass everything else. Of course, when hooked up backwards, the "spoofed" traffic was the legitimate traffic and any actual spoofed traffic would be passed through.

If you think back to the early days of wireless, there was the WEP encryption method. WEP was invented by people with very little concept of security and negligible knowledge about encryption. The result was an encryption standard that could be broken very easily.

In another case, I once came across some encryption that merely inverted the bits. They guy who came up with that scheme thought it was perfectly secure because nobody would ever think to invert the bits back again.

sliqua-jcooter ,Thank you for bringing Mozilla NSS to my attention. Still looks quite young only have an apache module however still an alternative that is worth trying, I'll put a LAMP stack together and give it a try.