What is "heartbleed"

Heartbleed is a security bug in the open-source OpenSSL cryptography library.

Heartbleed may also refer to:

• "Heartbleed", a song from the album We Are the Weirdos by the Peppermint Creeps
• "Heartbleed", a song by Tamra Keenan

Heartbleed is a security bug introduced in 2012 and disclosed in April 2014 in the OpenSSL cryptography library, which is a widely used implementation of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. Heartbleed may be exploited regardless of whether the party using a vulnerable OpenSSL instance for TLS is a server or a client. It results from improper input validation (due to a missing bounds check) in the implementation of the TLS heartbeat extension, thus the bug's name derives from "heartbeat". The vulnerability is classified as a buffer over-read, a situation where more data can be read than should be allowed.

Heartbleed is registered in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures system as CVE-2014-0160. The federal Canadian Cyber Incident Response Centre issued a security bulletin advising system administrators about the bug. A fixed version of OpenSSL was released on April 7, 2014, on the same day Heartbleed was publicly disclosed.

At the time of disclosure, some 17% (around half a million) of the Internet's secure web servers certified by trusted authorities were believed to be vulnerable to the attack, allowing theft of the servers' private keys and users' session cookies and passwords. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Ars Technica, and Bruce Schneier all deemed the Heartbleed bug "catastrophic". Forbes cybersecurity columnist Joseph Steinberg wrote, "Some might argue that [Heartbleed] is the worst vulnerability found (at least in terms of its potential impact) since commercial traffic began to flow on the Internet."

A British Cabinet spokesman recommended that "People should take advice on changing passwords from the websites they use... Most websites have corrected the bug and are best placed to advise what action, if any, people need to take." On the day of disclosure, the Tor Project advised anyone seeking "strong anonymity or privacy on the Internet" to "stay away from the Internet entirely for the next few days while things settle."

, 1.5% of the 800,000 most popular TLS-enabled websites were still vulnerable to Heartbleed.

TLS implementations other than OpenSSL, such as GnuTLS, Mozilla's Network Security Services, and the TLS stack used by Microsoft products, were not affected because the defect existed in the OpenSSL's implementation of TLS rather than in the Internet protocol itself.