Heartbleed snatched CloudFlare Crypto Keys!

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Private crypto keys are accessible to Heartbleed hackers, new data shows. Cloudflare published preliminary findings that seemed to indicate that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to use Heartbleed to get the vital key that essentially unlocks the secure sockets layer padlock in millions of browsers. To be extra-sure, Cloudflare launched “The Heartbleed Challenge” to see how other people exploiting Heartbleed might fare. The company set up an nginx server running a Heartbleed-vulnerable version of OpenSSL and invited the Internet at large to steal its private key.
Four people have been able to see server keys and certificates in a test.


The results are a strong indication that merely updating servers to a version of OpenSSL that's not vulnerable to Heartbleed isn't enough. Because Heartbleed exploits don't by default show up in server logs, there's no way for sites that were vulnerable to rule out the possibility the private certificate key was plucked out of memory by hackers. Anyone possessing the private key can use it to host an impostor site that is virtually impossible for most end users to detect. Anyone visiting the bogus site would see the same https prefix and padlock icon accompanying the site's authentic server.

The demonstration that it's possible to extract private SSL certificates means that out of an abundance of caution, administrators of sites that used vulnerable versions of OpenSSL should revoke and replace old certificates with new ones as soon as possible. Given the huge number of sites affected, the revelation could create problems.

"The bad news is that discovery changes our recommendation from: reissue and revoke as a medium priority to reissue and revoke as a high priority," Matt Prince, CEO of CloudFlare wrote in an e-mail to Ars. "We've accelerated our own reissuance and revocation process."

Cloudflare had originally reasoned that, at least on the Linux-based platform it uses, a server's certificate and private keys are usually stored in the server's memory early on after booting up, and because servers are not booted up frequently, it would be difficult to find a situation in which the block of memory that Heartbleed can be used to access (which can be up to 64Kb of information) would contain a server's private keys.

The process of revoking and reissuing certificates is unwieldy and slow even without half of the Internet trying to do the same process at the same time. “If every site revoked its certificates, it would impose a significant burden and performance penalty on the Internet,” wrote CloudFlare in a Friday blog post. “At CloudFlare-scale the reissuance and revocation process could break the Certificate Authority infrastructure.”

The company said that for its customers running on CloudFlare infrastructure, it has already begun the process of reissuing and revoking SSL certificates in stages, and expects to be done with the process sometime next week.