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Heartbleed OpenSSL Vulnerability: A Technical Remediation
An anonymous reader writes "Since the announcement malicious actors have been leaking software library data and using one of the several provided PoC codes to attack the massive amount of services available on the internet. One of the more complicated issues is that the OpenSSL patches were not in-line with the upstream of large Linux flavors. We have had a opportunity to review the behavior of the exploit and have come up with the following IDS signatures to be deployed for detection."
Was this badly translated from another language, or have I been out of system administration too long?
To be fair, nobody knows if this was exploited in the wild or not already - so the "mess" was going to happen anyway (unless you planned to patch your server, assuming your certificate was still good, and not tell any of your users that their passwords may have been exposed in the last couple years).
I'm running Linux Mint Olivia -- the next to current version -- an no openssl patch is yet available as of this afternoon. I image there are quite a few similar distros. Since I have actual work to do, and can't risk wasting two hours on a potentially borked upgrade, I'm stuck to trying not to use programs affected by the exploit for the duration.
While something tells me this exploit is somewhat overblown, what really ticks me off is that this is all the result of delegating memory management to C pointers and basically mmap. As far as I'm concerned, in this day and age, that amounts to spaghetti code and I can't say it endears me to the reliability of openssl.
Please, we need SSL to be secure, not fast. Just use a less efficient method to make things more secure.
May the Maths Be with you!
Except now pretty much every affected machine needs to have its SSL certificates and private keys revoked and trashed, and new keys/certificates issued.
In the meantime, thousands (if not millions) of sites leaked sensitive data to anyone who wanted to snoop on it.
Yeah, no big deal, none at all...no repercussions will come of this.
There is well written C, and there is poorly written C. I've been through the bowels of OpenSSL, and there are parts of it that frighten me. Ninety percent of the issues in OpenSSL could be solved by adopting a modern coding style and using better static analysis. While static analysis tools can't find vulnerabilities, they can root out code smell that hides vulnerabilities. If, for instance, I followed the advice of two of the quality commercial static analyzers that I ran against the OpenSSL code base, I would have been forced to refactor the code in such a way that this bug would have either been obvious to anyone casually reviewing it, if the refactor did not eliminate the bug all together.
C and C++ are not necessarily the problem. It's true that higher level languages solve this particular kind of vulnerability, but they are not safe from other vulnerabilities. To solve problems like these, we need better coding style in critical open source projects.