Monthly Archives: April 2014

Detecting Heartbleed Traffic

The big news in the tech industry this week is The Heartbleed Bug, a vulnerability that affects a large portion of secure web sites on the Internet. I updated the Wireshark and WinPcap web sites on Monday (along with reissuing and revoking certificates) shortly after OS patches were released.

Our web sites are protected going forward, but what about the past? We have a Shark appliance in our environment but that leads to a challenge. We had about 350 GB of HTTPS on our network on Monday alone. This is just slightly too large to load into Wireshark.

Fortunately one of my coworkers (P.J. Malloy) came up with a BPF filter that matches Heartbleed traffic:

http://www.riverbed.com/blogs/Retroactively-detecting-a-prior-Heartbleed-exploitation-from-stored-packets-using-a-BPF-expression.html

Applying this filter directly on the Shark appliance gave me a much smaller number of packets which I could easily analyze in Wireshark. So far I haven’t found anything suspicious.