> This Administration takes seriously its responsibility to help maintain an open, interoperable, secure and reliable Internet.
> When Federal agencies discover a new vulnerability in commercial and open source software – a so-called “Zero day” vulnerability because the developers of the vulnerable software have had zero days to fix it – it is in the national interest to responsibly disclose the vulnerability rather than to hold it for an investigative or intelligence purpose.
> This process is called the Vulnerabilities Equities Process. Unless there is a clear national security or law enforcement need, this process is biased toward responsibly disclosing such vulnerabilities.
Nothing about this statement makes me believe that they were unaware of Heartbleed, specifically because it seems to imply that they don't stockpile vulns that they find, which we know that they do.
> The Federal government relies on OpenSSL to protect the privacy of users of government websites and other online services.
The only damage that seems to be claimed specifically in their report is that not fixing Heartbleed would compromise public interface security, and not necessarily any government internal security.
> I pointed out here on HN even before the ODNI released the statement I linked above that Heartbleed is far more damaging to the USG itself than any intel value NSA could have hoped to achieve from it.
I suspect that this isn't true, especially if the US government isn't using OpenSSL for their internal security.
> would have hurt a lot of USG (and just as importantly, private US) infrastructure, so even going by crazy USG logic the right thing to do would have been to disclose it
This didn't seem to be a paramount concern with their other spying activities, which have hurt the security of the US infrastructure and compromised us tech companies (both hardware and internet services) trying to compete internationally.
> But also, straight from the mouth of a USCYBERCOM strategist speaking to our class the other week.
If we're going with anecdotes, I've met a couple of military contractors who claimed to have known of Heartbleed ahead of the public disclosure by non-trivial periods of time.
