Theo De Raadt's Small Rant On OpenSSL

New submitter raides (881987) writes "Theo De Raadt has been on a better roll as of late. Since his rant about FreeBSD playing catch up, he has something to say about OpenSSL. It is worth the 5 second read because it is how a few thousand of us feel about the whole thing and the stupidity that caused this panic." Update: 04/10 15:20 GMT by U L : Reader badger.foo pointed out Ted Unangst (the Ted in the mailing list post) wrote two posts on the issue: "heartbleed vs malloc.conf and "analysis of openssl freelist reuse" for those seeking more detail.

Comments

Re:Summary.

[bluefoxlucid]

The problem is it would have crashed on OpenBSD if someone would have tested this exploit on OpenBSD, meaning someone would have to be looking for the exploit, meaning someone would have found a bunch of data coming back anyway and gone "oh lol wtf?".

If someone crashed your server trying to exploit it, you would probably not notice; since there aren't many OpenBSD servers, probably nobody would notice that these attacks were happening and gone, "Whoa! A wild 0-day exploit!" And even if they had, there's all these non-OpenBSD servers that are getting hacked and nobody can say if they're hacked or not, so we just get ourselves into this exact situation sooner. We don't come away with smaller collateral damage; EVERY SSL CERTIFICATE EVER ISSUED IS NOW INVALID.

Nothing Theo suggested changes the situation. Implementing malloc() protection everywhere might; but if you can show any ability to beat that protection a percentage of the time, then we're also in the same situation. We're talking about reads, so canaries aren't it. If you're crashing out on reads, then every malloc(1) that crashes if you read 2 requires 4096 bytes of real RAM to store 1 byte of data--we get into costs.