If you’ve been following this blog (my colleague, David Busby, posted about it yesterday) or any tech news outlet in the past few days, you’ve probably seen some mention of the “Heartbleed” vulnerability in certain versions of the OpenSSL library.
So what is ‘Heartbleed’, really?
In short, Heartbleed is an information-leak issue. An attacker can exploit this bug to retrieve the contents of a server’s memory without any need for local access. According to the researchers that discovered it, this can be done without leaving any trace of compromise on the system. In other words, if you’re vulnerable, they can steal your keys and you won’t even notice that they’ve gone missing. I use the word “keys” literally here; by being able to access the contents of the impacted service’s memory, the attacker is …
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