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Yes, my point was that OpenSSL did not throw away the standard library! openssl_{malloc|free} were thin wrappers over the native malloc() and free(), except that they tried to be clever and not natively free() memory areas so that they can be reused by openssl_malloc() without calling malloc() again. I.e. sometimes, openssl_free(buf) would not call free(buf), but leave buf untouched and put it in a queue -- and the openssl_malloc() would take it out of there and give it to callers.

So basically openssl_malloc() wasn't always malloc()-ing -- it would sometimes return a previously malloc()-ed aread that was never (actually) freed.

This rendered OpenBSD's hardened malloc() useless: you can configure OBSD to always initialize malloc-ed areas. If OpenSSL had used malloc() instead of openssl_malloc, even with the wrong (large and unchecked) size, the buffer would not have contained previous values, as it would have already been initialized to 0x0D. Instead, they'd return previous malloc()-ed -- and never actually free()-d -- buffers, that contained the old data. Since malloc() was not called for them, there was never a chance to re-initialize their contents.

This can trivially (if just as dumbly!) be implemented in Go. It's equally pointless (the reasons they did that were 100% historical), but possible. And -- assuming they'd have done away with the whole openssl_dothis() and openssl_dothat() crap -- heartbleed would have been trivially prevented in C by just sanely implementing malloc.

> (We eventually plan on supporting this case, just haven't gotten there yet.)

I'm really (and not maliciously!) curious about how this will be done :). You guys are doing some amazing work with Rust! Good luck!