Will the Heartbleed Bug Lead to a Decline of OpenSSL?

Not at all. In fact, Google is in the process of transitioning Chrome, currently the world's most popular web browser, from Mozilla's NSS library to OpenSSL (Chromium issue 338883: Switch from NSS to OpenSSL), a move that will bring hundreds of millions of new users to OpenSSL. This transition underscores the ongoing trust and investment in OpenSSL by major technology companies.

The Context of OpenSSL and Heartbleed

All software has had bugs and Heartbleed is only the most recent in a series of embarrassing vulnerabilities discovered and fixed this year across basically every open-source SSL/TLS implementation that anyone uses. These vulnerabilities could be a result of increased scrutiny following revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA has been working for some time to subvert Internet encryption. Alternatively, it shows that the open-source process is working, albeit with visible flaws that need addressing through continuous patching and scrutiny.

The Strengths and Benefits of Open Source

The open-source process is indeed the best way we currently know to write secure software. Nobody knows how many similarly embarrassing vulnerabilities are lurking in closed-source implementations where bugs could have been left by accident or deliberately planted by intelligence agents. When you use them, you have no choice but to blindly trust the company that developed it and the government of their jurisdiction, which inherently includes a higher risk.

Although we could exclude certain classes of bugs by writing in higher-level languages instead of C, that's not a magical, foolproof solution in today's reality. Higher-level languages come with extra language runtimes and virtual machines which are themselves large pieces of C code that get added to the attack surface. And we don't yet have higher-level languages that let us write libraries with the wide spectrum of cross-language bindings that are possible with C libraries.

OpenSSL: The Most Credible SSL/TLS Library

The fact is that OpenSSL almost certainly remains the most credible SSL/TLS library out there, followed closely by NSS and more distantly by GnuTLS. Typical homegrown implementations are missing basic features required for even minimal security such as certificate validation to say nothing of more advanced ones, like timing attack resistance and BEAST attack mitigation. And part of the Chrome transition will undoubtedly involve further security reviews that will help OpenSSL become even better. Jumping ship from OpenSSL now just because one leak has been plugged would be a grave mistake.

Google's BoringSSL Initiative

Recently, it has been announced that Chrome will be using a Google-maintained OpenSSL fork called BoringSSL. Google will continue to contribute patches upstream and finance OpenSSL development through multiple foundations. This initiative highlights Google's commitment to OpenSSL's continued growth, improvement, and adoption in the industry.