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Comment by sinak | Hacker News Reader

Neel Mehta tweeted that private keys wouldn't be in the heap near packet data on April 8th:

https://twitter.com/neelmehta/status/453625474879471616

I think I'm fine giving the guy who found the bug a pass for his 140 character suggestion.

I'm not looking to collect pelts. I just think there was a better way to address the question of private key exposure than "The Cloudflare Challenge". In the future, maybe we can address serious questions with engineering instead of marketing stunts; how about the "let's all work to instrument OpenSSL" challenge?

My issue with the Cloudflare Challenge can be summed up in: no matter what the results are, it will give people a diminished impression of the bug's actual impact. I can't fathom any way in which the Cloudflare Challenge was beneficial to the security of their customers (or anyone else, for that matter), which should be the goal of bounties; not to simply be a PR move.

My problem is that if you're trying to figure out how key material is distributed throughout heap memory, asking people to answer that question about an unknown private key through heartbleed "peeks" is about the most obtuse possible way to find out.

Yeah, the whole thing left a vaguely unpleasant taste. It worked in this case, but now that the marketing genie is out of the bottle it's going to make security vulnerability intelligence harder to evaluate. IMHO.

No, he didn't. He said that it's unlikely, and he's right. It's unlikely that I'm going to get heads 100 times in a row if I'm flipping a coin, but it suddenly becomes likely if I try it a couple million times. Being unlikely doesn't mean you shouldn't assume that it's possible for a motivated attacker. Especially when the barrier to entry is so extraordinarily low, as we've seen repeatedly (Cloudflare and Akamai, I'm looking at you).

Except that it isn't actually at all unlikely with some common configurations, which actually seem to give up the private key on every single attempt.

Fair point -- you're right that it's extremely configuration dependent. For many (especially in the Apache realm) it's trivial and very likely; others (especially Nginx) it's quite a bit more work. But even if he was 100% correct in it being unlikely, it still doesn't justify ignoring the threat, IMO.

I think we're in violent agreement here.

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