David Wong

cryptologie.net

cryptography, security, and random thoughts

Hey! I'm David, cofounder of zkSecurity, research advisor at Archetype, and author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I was previously a cryptography architect of Mina at O(1) Labs, the security lead for Libra/Diem at Facebook, and a security engineer at the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. Welcome to my blog about cryptography, security, and other related topics.

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How Heartbleed works thanks to XKCD

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I found a pretty nice explanation of Heartbleed for the layman in this XKCD comic. Heartbleed is a recent and alarming vulnerability found in the OpenSSL toolkit that serves most of the application/websites today. To quote Schneier:

“Catastrophic” is the right word. On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11.

Here’s the comic:

heartbleed

And if you want to dig a bit more into it, you can read some more explanations on security.stackexchange.

suggested reads:
→ Heartbleed : serious vulnerability in open SSL • blog
→ The Heartbleed Challenge • blog
→ NSA was not aware of the Heartbleed bug • blog
← back to all posts blog • 2014-04-11
currently reading:
How Heartbleed works thanks to XKCD
04-11 blog
recent posts:
New cryptologie.net
07-20 blog
Weaponizing AI Assistants: With Their Permission
07-20 blog
What are Schwartz-Zippel circuits? How do they relate to iterative constraint systems?
05-29 blog
Short Note On Montgomery Reduction: Why Operating Modulo b?
05-24 blog
Still confused by Plonk's permutation?
03-13 blog
📖 my book
Real-World Cryptography is available from Manning Publications.
A practical guide to applied cryptography for developers and security professionals.
🎙️ my podcast
Two And A Half Coins on Spotify.
Discussing cryptocurrencies, databases, banking, and distributed systems.
📺 my youtube
Cryptography videos on YouTube.
Video explanations of cryptographic concepts and security topics.