Debian adds negative value on security issues. The Debian ssh key vulnerability was among the worst vulnerabilities ever seen in general-purpose computing, and also a predictable result of Debian policies which remain in place to this day. It will happen again sooner or later.
The ssh key vulnerability was as much a fault of the upstream as it was Debian: the Debian maintainer who made the patch explicitly asked the OpenSSL mailing list if it was okay, and they indicated at least acquiescence in the change.
Given that upstream OpenSSL itself would have the Heartbleed bug revealed a decade later, with all the revelations of its source code quality made more notable as a result, I'm willing to place more blame on OpenSSL than Debian here.
> The ssh key vulnerability was as much a fault of the upstream as it was Debian: the Debian maintainer who made the patch explicitly asked the OpenSSL mailing list if it was okay, and they indicated at least acquiescence in the change.
IIRC they asked a list that was not the main project list and not intended for security-critical questions. Code that actually goes in to OpenSSL gets a lot more scrutiny from the OpenSSL side, and other big-name distributions either have dedicated security teams that review changes to security-critical packages, or don't modify upstream sources for them. Debian is both unusually aggressive in its patching (not just for OpenSSL; look at e.g. the cdrecord drama) and unusually lax in its security review.
> Given that upstream OpenSSL itself would have the Heartbleed bug revealed a decade later, with all the revelations of its source code quality made more notable as a result, I'm willing to place more blame on OpenSSL than Debian here.
Heartbleed was a much more "normal"/defensible bug IMO. Buffer overflows are a normal/expected part of using memory-unsafe languages; every major C/C++ project has had them. Not using random numbers to generate your cryptographic key is just hilariously awful.
> Debian ssh key vulnerability was among the worst vulnerabilities ever seen in general-purpose computing
interesting, I wasn't aware of the history of this vulnerability. For anyone else curious, here's an analysis of what happened:
https://research.swtch.com/openssl
