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OpenSSL Bug Allows Attackers To Read Memory In 64k Chunks
Bismillah (993337) writes "A potentially very serious bug in OpenSSL 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 beta has been discovered that can leak just about any information, from keys to content. Better yet, it appears to have been introduced in 2011, and known since March 2012."
Quoting the security advisory: "A missing bounds check in the handling of the TLS heartbeat extension can be used to reveal up to 64k of memory to a connected client or server." The attack may be repeated and it appears trivial to acquire the host's private key. If you were running a vulnerable release, it is even suggested that you go as far as revoking all of your keys. Distributions using OpenSSL 0.9.8 are not vulnerable (Debian Squeeze vintage). Debian Wheezy, Ubuntu 12.04.4, Centos 6.5, Fedora 18, SuSE 12.2, OpenBSD 5.4, FreeBSD 8.4, and NetBSD 5.0.2 and all following releases are vulnerable. OpenSSL released 1.0.1g today addressing the vulnerability. Debian's fix is in incoming and should hit mirrors soon, Fedora is having some trouble applying their patches, but a workaround patch to the package .spec (disabling heartbeats) is available for immediate application.
Irony rears it's head on the day that patches for a Linux vulnerability are announced at the same time Microsoft ends its patching and update service for Windows XP.
How is a vulnerability in OpenSSL, which is a library that can be compiled for multiple platforms, a "Linux vulnerability"?
Somewhere higher up the bug is described as a "simple bounds check" — which would be easy to implement. The truth is, probably, in between somewhere.
It's not the fix of the code that's messy. It's the fix of the trusts using that code to function. They are all broken. After the upgrade keys need to be replaced, certificates re-issued, endpoints and clients reconfigured to trust new keys, and in some cases customers and end-users may need to be involved. For anything of CDE level security or higher, it's as big a cleanup job than the one that gave us openssl-blacklist, but the blacklist for this would be neither complete nor easy to assemble.
I predict a lot more interest in turning on CRL pathways in the future.
Someone had to do it.
That's not a fair generalization. Though there are plenty of "ideologically driven amateurs" — especially in the Linux (compared to BSD) world — they are mostly found among the noisy advocates, rather than actual developers.
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systemd devs seem bound and determined to prove you wrong there...
This is a read overrun, so ASLR won't save you. Ignore the guy above who posted about ASLR bypasses--that's not really relevant to this.