Live data from Hacker News

CloudFlare's Heartbleed challenge cracked

twitter.com

51–60 of 155 posts

Re: CloudFlare's Heartbleed challenge cracked

#51
"We rebooted the server at 3:08PST, which may have contributed to the key being available in memory, but we can’t be certain.". https://www.cloudflarechallenge.com/heartbleed

That doesn't make sense to me, seems like the key needs to be in memory all the time, or at least during every session.

Re: CloudFlare's Heartbleed challenge cracked

#52
post #51

"We rebooted the server at 3:08PST, which may have contributed to the key being available in memory, but we can’t be certain.". https://www.cloudflarechallenge.com/heartbleed That doesn't make sense to me, seems like the key needs to be in memory all the time, or at least during every session.

Yes, but if you read the original article [1], they discuss the fact that on Apache servers it is much easier to bleed the key if you manage to make the first request to a newly-started server, because Apache moves the key through some temporary structures early on that then get freed, and after a few requests the freed memory is overwritten. I think they're speculating that a similar thing might occur in nginx.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/answering-the-critical-question-...

Re: CloudFlare's Heartbleed challenge cracked

#54
post #37

* From https://www.cloudflarechallenge.com/heartbleed * So far, two people have independently solved the Heartbleed Challenge. The first was submitted at 4:22:01PST by Fedor Indutny (@indutny). He sent at least 2.5 million requests over the span of the challenge, this was approximately 30% of all the requests we saw. The second was submitted at 5:12:19PST by Illkka Mattila using around 100 thousand requests. We confi…

I wonder if the trick is to just send so many things that memory wraps around to a place where the key is exposed.

That was my plan of attack, I left my machine at home sniffing, wonder if I caught it.

Had bleed running in a while loop with no sleep and ab running on a loop as well sending connections to the server hoping to get the mem jostled around enough to cause something like that you described.

I was unsuccessful as of 9:30AM... now I'm really curious to get home and see if I actually caught it... even though I already missed the $10k boat :(

Re: CloudFlare's Heartbleed challenge cracked

#56
post #51

"We rebooted the server at 3:08PST, which may have contributed to the key being available in memory, but we can’t be certain.". https://www.cloudflarechallenge.com/heartbleed That doesn't make sense to me, seems like the key needs to be in memory all the time, or at least during every session.

It seems that someone is doing some requests with RSA keys as a parameter. It doesn't make sense at all to me doing such request in order to get the server private key. Anyone seeing the same?

Re: CloudFlare's Heartbleed challenge cracked

#59
post #29
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was lucky, my boss understood pretty quickly how big a deal it was. My project manager didn't, though, but he did pretty quick when I cracked our dev server and told him his password for a couple of services. It was fun playing pen tester and getting paid for it this week :)

Do you guys store passwords in plain text? Shouldn't you only be able to get password hashes from a vulnerable server? I might be reading too much into your statement, but I'd like to know if I'm misunderstanding the situation.

you are underestimating the severity of the bug. The bug leaks server memory - in which case unencrypted passwords are being sent to the server by the user's browser in order to be hashed to be compared to the hashed versions in storage.

Normally this is protected by tls, but as you can see, for servers that suffer from this hole, it's as good as naught.

Note that this occurs for "any" connections hitting the vulnerable server, meaning that the patient attacker can just run this in a script and scoop up passwords, credit card #'s, form information POST'ed in by all users of the web service all day long until the hole is closed. and even then there's a good chance that the private keys were already exposed, in which case the attacker can now masquerade as the server.

Post reply on HN