Heartbleed Explanation

[jducoeur]

For those who haven't already seen it, and were wondering about the "Heartbleed bug" that everyone was in a tizzy about this week, yesterday's XKCD comic gives an unusually clear and simple explanation of it, which can be understood even without much tech background. It's not even very metaphorical -- aside from the fact that you have to ask the questions in a formal way over the Internet, rather than by saying them, this is how it works.

Most security problems are kind of subtle, and require a measure of expertise in order to exploit them; this one is really dead-simple, and while it hands you back somewhat random data, that data is often fairly dangerous and useful. Hence this week's massive fire drill across the Internet, as everyone hastily fixed the bug...