The Heartbleed bug was discovered in 2014 and is widely referred to under MITRE's Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) as CVE-2014-0160. This bug affects the OpenSSL implementation of the Transp

Public keys are, by design, intended to be openly shared and are not considered sensitive information if exposed. The compromise associated with Heartbleed was the exposure of data that should have remained secret.

The Heartbleed bug exploited a flaw in the OpenSSL library's TLS Heartbeat extension, allowing an attacker to request an arbitrary amount of data from the server's memory. This memory could contain highly sensitive information, most notably the server's private key, which, if compromised, would allow an attacker to decrypt past and future TLS communications and impersonate the server.

While shared keys (symmetric session keys) could potentially be exposed if present in the compromised memory, the critical impact of Heartbleed was the compromise of the long-term server *private key*, which could then be used to derive or decrypt session keys.

Root keys belong to Certificate Authorities (CAs) and are used to sign certificates. While a server might have a copy of a root certificate, the Heartbleed bug primarily exposed the server's *private key*, which is distinct from a CA's root key.