Speaking as a security researcher at Akamai, I can say that tptacek is 100% correct here. We're absolutely better off for having received Willem's report, and I'm pretty sure we're all mature enough to tolerate the jabs that accompanied it.

I didn't have any part in writing this allocator, but I was asked to do a code review prior to publication. I told Rich Salz that it would take me at least two days to do a thorough one, and we both made the decision that it was better that we just get this code out there for public review and discussion than that we wait until we thought it was perfect.

So, with the caveat that we're still evaluating most of Willem's technical claims (and I'm probably going to be in the office all night doing so), the only sentence in Willem's report that I really take exception to is this one:

  In either case they should not be sending out non-functional,
  bug ridden patches to the OpenSSL community, while claiming
  they protected Akamai against the Heartbleed attack.

This statement is self-refuting. If we hadn't published this patch, we wouldn't be having this discussion, and some of the bugs that Willem and others are finding would have gone unnoticed. I almost certainly would have caught the issue with the CRT intermediates if Willem hadn't done so first, but I doubt I'd have caught everything that has or will be identified through public scrutiny.

There's probably a middle ground here. If you'd taken the time to make sure the patch actually compiled, ran and attempted the things it was advertised to do before releasing it, I suspect problems with it would've been obvious sooner.

That's quite possible. It's also quite possible that we still wouldn't have released it yet, as we'd be doing that work to make it generally usable this week. Therefore, the critical failure - that we weren't protecting the CRT values - might not have been known yet.

Sadly, the multiverse doesn't yet let me monitor its A/B tests.

tptacek, we all want to hear Willem Pinckaers' take, it is really good stuff.

I also want to hear ideas from Akamai, even if they aren't perfect. Perhaps they can lead to good things.

Unfortunately Pinckaers' commentary is a little bit too hostile and calls for Akamai to cease sharing ideas[1].

I'm sure Akamai's developers are "adult" enough, as you say, to handle it. However there is a trope in software development community that if you share something, you should be fine with being open to no holds barred attacks. Wouldn't the more "adult" behavior be to criticize in a more professional tone that is open to refinement of ideas and could spark further collaboration? I'd like to see this type of communication more in the software world, I think it would encourage more participation.

[1]"they should not be sending out non-functional, bug ridden patches to the OpenSSL community"

I think there's a difference between sharing ideas and sharing code.

An idea or concept on its own can't really do much, at least until it's put into practice somehow. The potential for harm is quite minimal, if it even exists.

Code, on the other hand, can often be directly used with relative ease by people who may not fully understand the possible implications of using such code. The potential for harm exists, and could be significant.

In the context of security, it's important to avoid potentially-harmful code wherever possible. If somebody has concerns about some code, regardless of who wrote it, it is best to express those concerns in a very blunt and direct manner.

Security is just not something to fool around with. The hard questions and painful facts should be out in the open, especially when code is involved and capable of being used. It's just not the time or place for pussyfooting around.

Yup. Hard to read! Better that than not to read it.

As Rich Salz said in the post to openssl-dev, this is a prototype that nobody should take and use straight. We did think we were pretty lucky that our old patch to keep keys from being swapped to disk could help us against Heartbleed. A major voice in the internal decision about whether to release it or keep it secret as a "competitive advantage" was the possibility that we were wrong---in the hopes that someone would discover this and tell us if so. We were wrong. Pinckaers discovered this, and told us so.

He can mock my coffee as weak and my nose as big for all I care, in return for that necessary warning that we were mistaken.

You probably meant something subtly different than what "competitive advantage" sounds like, w/r/t hardening the public OpenSSL code. :)