Saint Heartbleed, the Bleeding Heart of OpenSSL

Patron of sysadmins renewing certificates at midnight, open source projects held up by a few volunteers, and logos for vulnerabilities.

Life

On 7 April 2014 OpenSSL announced a flaw in the Heartbeat extension, found independently by Neel Mehta of Google and by researchers at Codenomicon. With every heartbeat a server could hand back up to 64 KB of its memory: passwords, cookies, even private keys. It had been there since 2012, hit a large share of the encrypted web, and was the bug that made names, websites and logos fashionable: ever since, every vulnerability dreams of a bleeding heart.

Prayer

O Saint Heartbleed, who lets a secret slip with every beat, let our servers always check how long the thing they received really is. And send funding to those who maintain the libraries the world rests on. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by upgrading OpenSSL to 1.0.1g, revoking certificates, changing passwords and donating to an open source project.

A heart that beats too much says too much.