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Dagon comments on Open Thread April 8 - April 14 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I changed passwords on gmail, but what I'm wondering is why I haven't seen a single announcement on any of the sites I log in to about the issue, including gmail, and others that third party sites have listed as vulnerable.
I have friends who do security at Google, and they explicitly told me "we don't think the company was vulnerable and you don't need to change your GMail password." So as near as I can tell, the third-party sites and Google, inc, disagree about whether Google is vulnerable here.
I checked my Gmail login locations after I heard about Heartbleed and saw one location that was obviously not anywhere I had been in the last month. So based on that information I assumed that Gmail was compromised and changed my password.
How often do you check your login locations?
It checks for you, by the way, and will block an attempt and notify you if it looks suspicious. This happened to me earlier this month. Interestingly, that happened 4 days after the vulnerable OpenSSL version was released and my Gmail password is basically the only the one which I do not reuse anywhere and I don't know how anyone could have gotten it... Still more likely to have been a keylogger or something.
Um. Google said: (emphasis mine)
The fact that patches were needed pretty much says that the services mentioned were vulnerable.
Context: I want to give some insight as to why I (and others) voted for "not changing password, not very worried" and as to why the company is not telling everybody to change password immediately.
I agree that the fact that patches were needed does imply that they were running the bad OpenSSL versions. The company is saying, on the record, that people do not need to change passwords. And this matches what I am hearing informally from friends who work there.
Is it good hygiene to change passwords? Yes. Given two-factor authentication and perfect forward secrecy, it might not be super critical though.
Let me ask an important question: how does Google know? A successful Heartbleed attack leaves no traces unless you're logging all the packets you received in pretty ridiculous detail.
Bruce Schneier says: "At this point, the probability is close to one that every target has had its private keys extracted by multiple intelligence agencies." I consider his opinions to be credible.
Update: Bloomberg says: "The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said."
Yes. The NSA isn't a threat I worry about, since I figure they could get my stuff via a demand to Google, if they wanted it. I am primarily worried about non-government-aided criminals. See Steve Bellovin's analysis for why this isn't so suitable an attack for that class of adversary.
And look what your own link says:
"There's one password you should change nevertheless: your email password."
Besides, Bellovin is talking about what he calls the most serious case -- leakage of crypto keys. If the attackers snarfed your password, they don't need to sniff, mitm, or redirect your traffic.
I was going to wait until I get a message from Google, since I have 2-step verification enabled. I don't see how heartbleed could compromise it. Except of course for application-specific passwords.
I changed my password, but not solely due to the flaw - it was more a straw that broke the camel's back as I was using a password good enough for just email but not good enough for the master key to all my online (and banking) activity.