Heartbleed = overcomplexity + input validation failure

The Heartbleed vulnerability is because the OpenSSL code didn’t validate an input. It’s also because OpenSSL had unnecessary complexity.

OpenSSL has a heartbeat feature that allows clients to send up to 64 kilobytes of arbitrary data along with a field telling the server how much data was sent. The server then sends that same data back to confirm that the TLS/SSL connection is still alive. (Creating a new TLS/SSL connection can take significant effort.)

The problem is if the client specifies that it sent more data than it actually did, the server would send back the original data and some of its RAM. For example, suppose the client sent a 1K message but said it’s 64KB. In response, the server would send a 64KB message back, which was the original 1K message plus 63K of data from the server’s RAM, which could include sensitive, unencrypted data from other programs.

How this could have been prevented:

1. Avoid pointless complexity: don’t require the client to also send the length of the arbitrary text. The server should have been able to detect the length of the text.
2. Validate all input. The server failed to ensure that the client’s description of the text length matched its actual length. (The fact that the server could detect the message’s actual length further validates my view on #1.)

Keep it simple! In addition to driving up creation and maintenance costs, needless complexity is more opportunities for things to break.