Critical crypto bug in OpenSSL opens two-thirds of the Web to eavesdropping

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/04/critical-crypto-bug-in-openssl-opens-two-thirds-of-the-web-to-eavesdropping/

By Dan Goodin
Ars Technica
April 7, 2014

Researchers have discovered an extremely critical defect in the 
cryptographic software library an estimated two-thirds of Web servers use 
to identify themselves to end users and prevent the eavesdropping of 
passwords, banking credentials, and other sensitive data.

The warning about the bug in OpenSSL coincided with the release of version 
1.0.1g of the open-source program, which is the default cryptographic 
library used in the Apache and nginx Web server applications, as well as a 
wide variety of operating systems and e-mail and instant-messaging 
clients. The bug, which has resided in production versions of OpenSSL for 
more than two years, could make it possible for people to recover the 
private encryption key at the heart of the digital certificates used to 
authenticate Internet servers and to encrypt data traveling between them 
and end users. Attacks leave no traces in server logs, so there's no way 
of knowing if the bug has been actively exploited. Still, the risk is 
extraordinary, given the ability to disclose keys, passwords, and other 
credentials that could be used in future compromises.

"Bugs in single software or library come and go and are fixed by new 
versions," the researchers who discovered the vulnerability wrote in a 
blog post published Monday. "However this bug has left a large amount of 
private keys and other secrets exposed to the Internet. Considering the 
long exposure, ease of exploitations and attacks leaving no trace this 
exposure should be taken seriously."

The researchers, who work at Google and software security firm 
Codenomicon, said even after vulnerable websites install the OpenSSL 
patch, they may still remain vulnerable to attacks. The risk stems from 
the possibility that attackers already exploited the vulnerability to 
recover the private key of the digital certificate, passwords used to 
administer the sites, or authentication cookies and similar credentials 
used to validate users to restricted parts of a website. Fully recovering 
from the two-year-long vulnerability may also require revoking any exposed 
keys, reissuing new keys, and invalidating all session keys and session 
cookies. Members of the Tor anonymity project have a brief write-up of the 
bug here, and a this analysis provides useful technical details.

[...]



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