Man who introduced "Heartbleed" security flaw denies he inserted it deliberately

“On a scale of one to 10, it is an 11,” renowned security expert Bruce Schneier said of the bug.

Dr Seggelmann, of Münster in Germany, said the bug which introduced the flaw was “unfortunately” missed by him and a reviewer when it was introduced into the open source OpenSSL encryption protocol over two years ago.

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“I was working on improving OpenSSL and submitted numerous bug fixes and added new features,” he said.

“In one of the new features, unfortunately, I missed validating a variable containing a length.”

After he submitted the code, a reviewer “apparently also didn’t notice the missing validation”, Dr Seggelmann said, “so the error made its way from the development branch into the released version.” Logs show that reviewer was Dr Stephen Henson.

Dr Seggelmann said the error he introduced was “quite trivial”, but acknowledged that its impact was “severe”.

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