The Programmer Behind Heartbleed Speaks Out: It Was an Accident

The Internet bug known as Heartbleed was introduced to the world on New Year's Eve in December 2011. Now, one of the people involved is sharing his side of the story.

Programmer Robin Seggelmann says he wrote the code for the part of OpenSSL that led to Heartbleed. But it was an accident. He submitted the code to the OpenSSL project and other members reviewed it. Seggelmann later added another piece of code for a new feature, which the members then added. It was this added feature that introduced the bug.

Seggelmann told the Sydney Morning Herald that the actual error was "trivial," but that its impact was clearly severe. Since he and the reviewers missed the flaw, it eventually made its way to the official release, which went live on Dec. 31, 2011, according to logs. Read more...