search menu icon-carat-right cmu-wordmark
Carnegie Mellon University

Software Engineering Institute

CERT Coordination Center

OpenSSL TLS heartbeat extension read overflow discloses sensitive information

Vulnerability Note VU#720951

Original Release Date: 2014-04-08 | Last Revised: 2016-05-13

Overview

OpenSSL 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 beta contain a vulnerability that could disclose sensitive private information to an attacker. This vulnerability is commonly referred to as "heartbleed."

Description

OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f and 1.0.2 beta through 1.0.2-beta1 contain a flaw in its implementation of the TLS/DTLS heartbeat functionality (RFC6520). This flaw allows an attacker to retrieve private memory of an application that uses the vulnerable OpenSSL libssl library in chunks of up to 64k at a time. Note that an attacker can repeatedly leverage the vulnerability to increase the chances that a leaked chunk contains the intended secrets. The sensitive information that may be retrieved using this vulnerability include:

    • Primary key material (secret keys)
    • Secondary key material (user names and passwords used by vulnerable services)
    • Protected content (sensitive data used by vulnerable services)
    • Collateral (memory addresses and content that can be leveraged to bypass exploit mitigations)

Please see the Heartbleed website for more details. Exploit code for this vulnerability is publicly available. Any service that supports STARTTLS (imap,smtp,http,pop) may also be affected.

Impact

By attacking a service that uses a vulnerable version of OpenSSL, a remote, unauthenticated attacker may be able to retrieve sensitive information, such as secret keys. By leveraging this information, an attacker may be able to decrypt, spoof, or perform man-in-the-middle attacks on network traffic that would otherwise be protected by OpenSSL.

Solution

Apply an update

This issue is addressed in OpenSSL 1.0.1g. Please contact your software vendor to check for availability of updates. Any system that may have exposed this vulnerability should regenerate any sensitive information (secret keys, passwords, etc.) with the assumption that an attacker has already used this vulnerability to obtain those items. Old keys should be revoked.

Reports indicate that the use of mod_spdy can prevent the updated OpenSSL library from being utilized, as mod_spdy uses its own copy of OpenSSL. Please see https://code.google.com/p/mod-spdy/issues/detail?id=85 for more details.

Disable OpenSSL heartbeat support

This issue can be addressed by recompiling OpenSSL with the -DOPENSSL_NO_HEARTBEATS flag. Software that uses OpenSSL, such as Apache or Nginx would need to be restarted for the changes to take effect.

Use Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS)

PFS can help minimize the damage in the case of a secret key leak by making it more difficult to decrypt already-captured network traffic. However, if a ticket key is leaked, then any sessions that use that ticket could be compromised. Ticket keys may only be regenerated when a web server is restarted.

Vendor Information

720951
 
Expand all

View all 99 vendors View less vendors


CVSS Metrics

Group Score Vector
Base 5 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N
Temporal 4.1 E:F/RL:OF/RC:C
Environmental 6.5 CDP:LM/TD:H/CR:H/IR:H/AR:ND

References

Acknowledgements

This vulnerability was reported by OpenSSL, who in turn credits Riku, Antti and Matti at Codenomicon and Neel Mehta of Google Security.

This document was written by Will Dormann.

Other Information

CVE IDs: CVE-2014-0160
Date Public: 2014-04-07
Date First Published: 2014-04-08
Date Last Updated: 2016-05-13 15:26 UTC
Document Revision: 178

Sponsored by CISA.

Download PGP Key

Read CERT/CC Blog

Learn about Vulnerability Analysis