Socat is a more complex variant of "netcat". It is larger and more flexible and has more options that must be configured for a given task. On February 1, 2016, Santiago Zanella-Beguelin and Microsoft Vulnerability Research issued a security advisory regarding a composite Diffie-Hellman parameter which had been hard-coded into the OpenSSL implementation of "socat". The implausibility that a composite might have been unintentionally introduced where a prime number is required has led to the suspicion of sabotage to introduce a backdoor software vulnerability. This socat bug affected version 1.7.3.0 and 2.0.0-b8 it was corrected in following releases from 1.7.3.1 and 2.0.0-b9.