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How does a 3rd-party researcher find the next heartbleed if they can't even decrypt the binaries for analysis?

Binaries can be converted back to assembly and quite often even back to equivalent C; bugs are most often found by fuzzing (intentional or not) which does not require source code. The difference between open and closed source is that open is more often analysed by white hats who rather publish vulnerabilities and help fixing them, while closed by black hats who rather sell or exploit them in secret.

You misunderstand; if you can't even decrypt the binary, you can't disassemble, much less run a decompiler over it.

As someone who has done quite a bit of reverse engineering work, I have no idea how I'd identify and isolate a vulnerability found by fuzzing without the ability to even look at the machine code.

If it runs, it has to be decrypted (at a current level of cryptography); at most it is obfuscated and the access is blocked by some hardware tricks which may be costly to circumvent, but there is nothing fundamental stopping you.

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