[pro] Heartbleed?

[Max Rottenkolber]

On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 06:13:03 -0700, David McClain wrote:

>> . The design is just plain wrong.
> 
> Is that statement the benefit of hindsight knowledge, or do you have a
> more intelligent thought process behind it? (I can imagine the
> all-knowing smirk in the background, but I'd really like to know :-)

The exact opposite of all-knowing ;). In my opinion the TLS standard is 
too complex. Parts of it like the keep-alive, which is also a path MTU 
checking *framework*, as criticized by me (and further down discussed 
with Pascal).

Many security professionals have criticized the TLS committee for their 
standards. As a side note: OpenSSL has roughly 500k lines of code, I 
don't think its feasible to assure security on a code base of this 
magnitude.

If I imagine to implement a security protocol, e.g. "this code should be 
kept short and really really safe", and be confronted with e.g. the 
Heartbeat extension, I imagine despair.

So my conclusion is, a widely used security standard should be engineered 
well enough to be possible to implement correctly, even in a 4 digit ANSI 
C code base.