http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/07/massive-security-bug-in-openssl-could-effect-a-huge-chunk-of-the-internet/
I saw a t-shirt one time. “I’m a bomb disposal
technician,” it read. “If you see me running, try to keep up.”
The same sort of idea can be applied to net security:
when all the net security people you know are freaking out, it’s
probably an okay time to worry.
This afternoon, many of the net security people I know
are freaking out. A very serious bug in OpenSSL — a cryptographic
library that is used to secure a very, verylarge percentage of the Internet’s traffic — has just
been discovered and publicly disclosed.
Even if you’ve never heard of OpenSSL, it’s probably a
part of your life in one way or another — or, more likely, in many
ways. The apps you use, the sites you visit; if they encrypt the
data they send back and forth, there’s a good chance they use
OpenSSL to do it. The Apache web server that powers something like
50% of the Internet’s web sites, for example, utilizes OpenSSL.
Through a bug that security researchers have dubbed
“Heartbleed“, it seems that it’s possible to trick
almost any system running any version of OpenSSL from the past 2
years into revealing chunks of data sitting in its system
memory.
Why that’s bad: very, very sensitive data often sits in
a server’s system memory, including the keys it uses to encrypt and
decrypt communication (read: usernames, passwords, credit cards,
etc.) This means an attacker could quite feasibly get a server to
spit out its secret keys, allowing them to read to any
communication that they intercept like it wasn’t encrypted it all.
Armed with those keys, an attacker could also impersonate an
otherwise secure site/server in a way that would fool many of your
browser’s built-in security checks.
And if an attacker was just gobbling up mountains of
encrypted data from a server in hopes of cracking it at some point?
They may very well now have the keys to decrypt it, depending on
how the server they’re attacking was configured (like whether or
not it’s set up to utilize Perfect Forward Secrecy.)
The exploit relies on a bug in the implementation of
OpenSSL’s “heartbeat” feature, hence the “Heartbleed” name.
Security firm Codenomicon has written an in-depth breakdown of
the Heartbleed bug here.
To quote their findings:
We have tested some of our own services from attacker’s
perspective. We attacked ourselves from outside, without leaving a
trace. Without using any privileged information or credentials we
were able steal from ourselves the secret keys used for our X.509
certificates, user names and passwords, instant messages, emails
and business critical documents and communication.
It seems the bug has been in OpenSSL for 2+ years
(since December 2011, OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f) before
its publicly announced discovery today. Even
worse,it appears that exploiting this bug leaves no trace in
the server’s logs. So there’s no easy way for a system
administrator to know if their servers have been compromised; they
just have to assume that they have been.
The bug was discovered and reported to the OpenSSL team
by Neel Mehta of Google’s security team. OpenSSL released an
emergency patch for the bug along with a Security Advisory this afternoon.