heartleech
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heartleech scans systems for the Heartbleed vulnerability and downloads heartbleed data, with automatic private key retrieval and IDSIDSAn intrusion detection system, monitoring traffic or host activity for suspicious behavior and producing alerts. Detection alone does not necessarily block the activity. evasion support.
Summary
heartleech is an open-source command-line tool that scans for the Heartbleed OpenSSL vulnerability, dumps leaked memory, and automatically recovers private keys from vulnerable targets. It runs as a standalone binary built against OpenSSL's source, with threaded bulk downloading for offline analysis, STARTTLSSTARTTLSA protocol command that upgrades a plaintext connection to an encrypted TLS session without changing ports, used in SMTP, IMAP, and LDAP so tools can negotiate encryption opportunistically on standard service ports. and IPv6IPv6The current version of the Internet Protocol, standardized by the IETF, using 128-bit addresses to replace the exhausted IPv4 space. Cyber tools target it because modern networks run dual-stack or IPv6-only. support, and Tor/Socks5n proxying with connection diagnostics for testing through restrictive networks. This puts it in the hands of penetration testers and red teamers who need to confirm and exploit Heartbleed exposure rather than merely detect it, which sits it in the exploitation category alongside general Heartbleed scanners rather than broader vulnerability management platforms. The build process is notoriously fiddly, requiring OpenSSL to be compiled from source and linked manually, a sign of its age: first committed in 2014 with 9 contributors, and no commits in the past year.
heartleech scans systems for the Heartbleed vulnerability and downloads heartbleed data, with automatic private key retrieval and IDS evasion support.
How heartleech helps
Which hosts in my target range are actually vulnerable to Heartbleed rather than just running an old OpenSSL version?
sends a heartbeat probe to each host and returns a conclusive or inconclusive verdict per target, so ambiguous responses aren't reported as confirmed exposure
Can I recover a server's private key from a Heartbleed hole without a separate memory-parsing step?
pulls the certificate from the target, sends repeated heartbeats, and automatically searches the leaked memory for the matching private key in one pass
How much leaked memory can I pull from a vulnerable host before someone notices?
opens many threads to dump heartbeat data into large files as fast as possible for later offline analysis, rather than inspecting each leak interactively
What did I actually leak from a host I dumped earlier?
takes a previously saved bulk dump and searches through it offline for a private key, so the network exposure and the analysis are separate steps
Can I test a mail or database server that wraps TLS inside its own protocol?
negotiates the TLS handshake over STARTTLS first, so the heartbeat probe still lands after the plaintext-to-TLS upgrade instead of failing against a raw connection
Can I check for Heartbleed on a target I can only reach through Tor or a restricted network?
routes the probe through a Tor or Socks5n proxy and reports connection diagnostics, so failures show whether the proxy or the target is the reason a scan comes back inconclusive
Languages
Command line
| option | found in | since | description |
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Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for heartleech, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail heartleech puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
Nothing shipped since we started watching. Releases and docs updates land here as they happen.
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in robertdavidgraham/heartleech, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors not measured distinct committers, last 12 months
- Maintainers not measured core set, last 12 months
- Bus factor not measured committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed not measured of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close not measured issues closed, last 12 months
- Open backlog 10 of 24 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 10
- Contributors / month not measured
- Commits / month not measured
- Stars 711
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
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