On 13/06/2015 8:43 pm, Hanno Böck wrote:
Serious question: Is there any valid use case for heartbeats in TLS or
DTLS?
(With valid use case I mean something like "I use it for this system",
not answers like "you could use it for xy")
I don't use them for anything. We started to implement them for
BouncyCastle (D)TLS before heartbleed, but I can't see us ever actually
finishing that, and none of our users has ever asked for them.
I asked this question in the heartbleed aftermath a couple of times and
never got any reasonable answer. I have the feeling the only reason
this extension exists is that someone needed a topic for his thesis.
I'm more cynical and suspect heartbeats to have been designed to
complement the Dual EC exploitation outlined at
https://projectbullrun.org/dual-ec/index.html as a possible source of
attacker-visible PRNG output (quite separate to whatever suspicions
arise from Heartbleed itself).
If this extension isn't used then I think it shouldn't be fixed. It
should be removed. I think complexity is responsible for a large chunk
of the problems TLS has these days, therefore everything that can be
removed should be.
No objections here, although I'd prefer to see the patch applied before
any removal, since others may take it upon themselves to keep or copy
the code.
Regards,
Pete Dettman
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