The Heartbleed Bug and the Political Implications of Vulnerability Management

Today, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) recounted the happenings around the Heartbleed Bug, a pervasively occurring vulnerability of the widespread OpenSSL cryptographic software that was revealed by Google and a Finnish security firm on Monday. Along with the public notification, the information website heartbleed.com was established, explaining that “[t]he Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software[,]” allowing attackers to eavesdrop on communications and steal sensitive data among others. On his security blog, cryptography guru Bruce Schneier mentioned 500K sites to be vulnerable, classifying the level of how catastrophic the event is on a scale from 1 to 10 as 11.

I found that the coverage of the incident gained another momentum just a few hours ago, when Bloomberg reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) had exploited the vulnerability for “at least two years […] and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence,” according to “two people familiar with the matter.” USA today cited an official statement of the NSA denying knowledge of the Heartbleed Bug.

Reviewing the news of this week, two major implications in terms of cyber security policy seem to be represented by the Heartbleed Bug:

1. As CBC mentioned: “Disclosing a web problem also means alerting hackers.” The more widespread the vulnerability, the less co-ordinated the patch. This can lead to differing times of exposure to the alerted hackers. On the one hand, the many users of the vulnerable systems (e.g. different banks, or the website of the Canadian Revenue Agency, which has been compromised) patch the vulnerability at different times. On the other hand,  user notification about potential compromises happens at varying paces.  As a result of the Heartbleed disclosure, so CBC, “there has been confusion among consumers about what they should be doing, including whether they should be altering their passwords.” For more on the issue of breach notification on Crossroads, follow this link.
2. Regardless if the NSA knew about Heartbleed and exploited it or not, intelligence collection does use exploits to accomplish its mission (see also our coverage of exploits in cyber security). The dilemma is as obvious to me: national security interests confront those of millions of users who rely on a system which is known to be insecure to those who are tasked to guard them.