22.4 Heartbleed
In 2014, Google’s security team member Neel Mehta privately reported an implementation bug to OpenSSL’s developer team. The same bug was independently discovered by security engineers working for Codenomicon, a Finnish security company specialized in network security that was eventually acquired by Synopsys. Following its disclosure, Heartbleed was assigned the CVE number CVE-2014-0160.
At the time of Heartbleed’s disclosure, more than half a million web servers – about 17% of all web servers using TLS at that time – were believed to be vulnerable to the attack. More importantly, Heartbleed allowed attackers to steal the servers’ private keys.
The private key SKAlice of a TLS server is its long-term secret corresponding to the public key in the server’s certificate. If Eve manages to compromises Alice’s private key, this has grave consequences: Eve can impersonate Alice and decrypt any future communication between...
