Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Heartbleed Sparks 'Responsible' Disclosure Debate

Posted by Soulskill on from the arguing-about-ethics dept.

bennyboy64 writes: "IT security industry experts are beginning to turn on Google and OpenSSL, questioning whether the Heartbleed bug was disclosed 'responsibly.' A number of selective leaks to Facebook, Akamai, and CloudFlare occurred prior to disclosure on April 7. A separate, informal pre-notification program run by Red Hat on behalf OpenSSL to Linux and Unix operating system distributions also occurred. But router manufacturers and VPN appliance makers Cisco and Juniper had no heads up. Nor did large web entities such as Amazon Web Services, Twitter, Yahoo, Tumblr and GoDaddy, just to name a few. The Sydney Morning Herald has spoken to many people who think Google should've told OpenSSL as soon as it uncovered the critical OpenSSL bug in March, and not as late as it did on April 1. The National Cyber Security Centre Finland (NCSC-FI), which reported the bug to OpenSSL after Google, on April 7, which spurred the rushed public disclosure by OpenSSL, also thinks it was handled incorrectly. Jussi Eronen, of NCSC-FI, said Heartbleed should have continued to remain a secret and be shared only in security circles when OpenSSL received a second bug report from the Finnish cyber security center that it was passing on from security testing firm Codenomicon. 'This would have minimized the exposure to the vulnerability for end users,' Mr. Eronen said, adding that 'many websites would already have patched' by the time it was made public if this procedure was followed."

1 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No Good Solution. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    This really strikes me as the type of problem that will never have a good solution. There will always be competing interests and some of them will be mutually exclusive while still being valid concerns.

    Therefore the best solution is to public release so everyone has the information at the same time. Let them compete for the patch; Awful software publisher will be the one caught with bugs. Good one will be patch and secure while everyone else suffer their bad choice.

    Over time the best software will prevail and only idiots will still be using Microsoft products... that the theory. In practice there is corruption and bad software will linger for decades.