Saturday, April 12, 2014

Heartbleed

After seeing a lot mentioned about the Heartbleed issue, I decided to find some more information about it because it is effecting many big websites and your information could potentially be compromised. So, how Heartbleed works is it takes advantage of an SSL flaw. SSL is the protocol that encrypts https, which is your secure connection to the internet.This occurs by having a serverhello and a clienthello. After this, they confirm session ids and the server will send a sipherspec record. This is when the data is transferred. After that the server and client send each other finished messages and the session is disconnected. Heartbleed allows people to make memory dumps from OpenSSL. This allows them to read everything that was supposed to be encrypted. Essentially, it is a memory leak in the worst place ever. It leaks the primary key for the encryption that takes place, so everything can be decrypted instantly. The good news is that there has been a patch already to fix this. So, all we need to do is to change our passwords. This link will lead you to mashable's list of passwords you need to change because not everything was effected by Heartbleed. Also, a little extra information about Heartbleed, the reason for the name is because it takes place during the heartbeat process of SSL. Be careful out there on the web and change your passwords!

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