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Re: [TLS] Heartbeat and padding

Hanno Böck <hanno@hboeck.de> Sun, 27 April 2014 15:42 UTC

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Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2014 17:41:49 +0200
From: Hanno Böck <hanno@hboeck.de>
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Subject: Re: [TLS] Heartbeat and padding
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On Sat, 26 Apr 2014 17:27:41 -0700
Michael D'Errico <mike-list@pobox.com> wrote:

> Not related to Heartbleed(tm), do we need to revisit the Heartbeat
> spec. due to the random padding?

I've been trying to find out any uses for Heartbeat in the past weeks
and have asked lots of people (also on this list). I got lots of "you
could use it for this and that", but not a single pointer to a real
piece of software doing anything with it.

If you have any use case (a real one, not a fantasy one) come back and
talk about fixing it. Until then: The "fix" for all problems with the
Heartbeat extension is to disable it.

tl;dr: TLS became too complex. Getting rid of unused extensions and
features is the first step to fix that.

-- 
Hanno Böck
http://hboeck.de/

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