Menu
With all the chatter going on about the heartbleed bug, it's hard to find information on what exactly the exploited heartbeat extension for OpenSSL is used for.
Also, is it possible to disable it for Apache w/ mod_ssl without recompling with the -DOPENSSL_NO_HEARTBEATS flag as suggested @ http://heartbleed.com/?
879
The Heartbeat Extension provides a new protocol for TLS/DTLS allowing the usage of keep-alive functionality without performing a renegotiation and a basis for path MTU (PMTU) discovery for DTLS.
The Heartbleed Bug is a serious vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library. This weakness allows stealing the information protected, under normal conditions, by the SSL/TLS encryption used to secure the Internet.
OpenSSL processes in the machine that are responding to Heartbeat requests don't verify if the payload size is same as what is specified in length field. Thus, the machine copies extra data residing in memory after the payload into the response. This is how the Heartbleed vulnerability works.
A heartbeat is a type of a communication packet that is sent between nodes. Heartbeats are used to monitor the health of the nodes, networks and network interfaces, and to prevent cluster partitioning.
Heartbeat is an echo functionality where either side (client or server) requests that a number of bytes of data that it sends to the other side be echoed back. The idea appears to be that this can be used as a keep-alive feature, with the echo functionality presumably meant to allow verifying that both ends continue to correctly handle encryption and decryption. The problem, of course, is that until the recent patch, OpenSSL did not guard against sending back more data than was provided in the first place. I'm not really aware of where the heartbeat extension is actually used in an application since most communication that requires it (e.g. websockets) rely on their own keep-alive features implemented on a higher level.
I can't answer your second question---but it would surprise me if the answer was yes.
180
answered Sep 18 '22 21:09
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
