{"id":32781,"date":"2014-04-14T13:15:25","date_gmt":"2014-04-14T13:15:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/here-is-why-this-is-so-bad-the-heartbeat-response-2\/"},"modified":"2014-04-14T13:15:25","modified_gmt":"2014-04-14T13:15:25","slug":"here-is-why-this-is-so-bad-the-heartbeat-response-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/here-is-why-this-is-so-bad-the-heartbeat-response-2\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Here is why this is so bad: the heartbeat response can contain up to sixty-four kilobytes of whatever data happens to be in the server\u2019s random access memory at the moment the request arrives. There is no way to predict what that memory will contain, but system memory routinely contains login names, passwords, secure certificates, and access tokens of all kinds. System memory is temporary: it is erased when a computer is shut down, and the data it holds is written and overwritten all the time. It is generally regarded as safe to load things like cryptographic keys or unencrypted passwords into system memory\u2014indeed, there is little a computer can usefully do without temporarily storing pieces of sensitive data in its system memory. The Heartbleed bug allows an attacker to \u201cbleed\u201d out random drops of this memory simply by asking for it. Heartbeat requests aren\u2019t usually logged or monitored in any way, so an attack leaves no trace. It\u2019s not even possible to distinguish malicious heartbeat requests from authentic requests without close analysis. So an attacker can request new pieces of system memory over and over again; it\u2019s almost impossible for the victim to know they\u2019ve been targeted, let alone to know what data might have been stolen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<div class='attribution'><a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/online\/blogs\/elements\/2014\/04\/the-internets-telltale-heartbleed.html\">The Internet\u2019s Telltale Heartbleed<\/a> (via <a href=\"http:\/\/azspot.net\/\" class=\"tumblr_blog\">azspot<\/a>)<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here is why this is so bad: the heartbeat response can contain up to sixty-four kilobytes of whatever data happens to be in the server\u2019s random access memory at the moment the request arrives. There is no way to predict what that memory will contain, but system memory routinely contains login names, passwords, secure certificates, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[1539],"class_list":["post-32781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","tag-emergent-digital-practices","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-8wJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32781\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}