How to Check and Fix OpenSSL Heartbleed bug in cPanel/WHM servers

Tutorials - Apr 09, 2014 | by - one comment - 18,426 views

The Heartbleed Bug is a serious vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library.Essentially this means you probably need to regenerate the private keys used to create your SSL certificates, and have them reissued by your certificate authority.This is not a difficult task but does take some time to get OpenSSL updated across all your servers, then go through the process to generate, reissue and install certificates across all locations they are deployed.

The bug is not present in 1.0.1g, nor is it present in the 1.0.0 branch nor the 0.9.8 branch of OpenSSL some sources report 1.0.2-beta is also affected by this bug at the time of writing, however it is a beta product and I would really recommend not to use beta quality releases for something as fundamentally important as OpenSSL in production.

Status of different versions:

Vulnerable OpenSSL versions:
  • OpenSSL 1.0.1 vulnerable
  • OpenSSL 1.0.1a vulnerable
  • OpenSSL 1.0.1b vulnerable
  • OpenSSL 1.0.1c vulnerable
  • OpenSSL 1.0.1d vulnerable
  • OpenSSL 1.0.1e vulnerable
  • OpenSSL 1.0.1f vulnerable

through 1.0.1f (inclusive) are vulnerable.

NOT Vulnerable versions:
  • OpenSSL 1.0.1g is NOT vulnerable
  • OpenSSL 1.0.0 branch is NOT vulnerable
  • OpenSSL 0.9.8 branch is NOT vulnerable

CentOS / Redhat release has already published the new patched version of OpenSSL1.0.1. Please check https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2014-0376.html

How to check Heartbleed Bug:

You can check Heartbleed bug by using the following sites:

http://filippo.io/Heartbleed

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest

Make sure every thing is reported okay.

How to FIX OpenSSL Vulnerability

The patched OpenSSL 1.0.1 RPM has already been published to the RHEL 6 and CentOS 6 repositories, so the only steps that should be necessary to update these servers are to run “yum update” to install the updated version of OpenSSL and then either fully restart all SSL-enabled services, including sshd, or reboot the server. I recommend rebooting the server so that no services are missed, and it also gives you the opportunity to install an updated kernel if one is available.

So if your system is prone to this vulnerability or reported as vulnerable from above sites then you may please proceed with the following steps:

# yum update

Make sure you have the updated OpenSSL packages are installed, then try to rebuild your server software’s using:

# /scripts/easyapache

Make sure the newly installed OpenSSL version include patched CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures).

# rpm -qa | grep openssl

Output Should look like:

# rpm -qa | grep openssl
openssl-1.0.1e-16.el6_5.7.x86_64
openssl-devel-1.0.1e-16.el6_5.7.x86_64
# rpm -q --changelog openssl-1.0.1e | grep -B 1 CVE-2014-0160

Output Should look like:

# rpm -q --changelog openssl-1.0.1e | grep -B 1 CVE-2014-0160
* Mon Apr 07 2014 Tomáš Mráz <tmraz@redhat.com> 1.0.1e-16.7
- fix CVE-2014-0160 - information disclosure in TLS heartbeat extension

Restart all services like cPanel ,SSHD ,HTTPD ,Dovecot ,Pure-Ftpd ,MySQL and any other services that are using SSL libraries.I recommend rebooting the server so that no services are missed.

If your server is RHEL 5/Centos 5 then OpenSSL does not have the bug and its version would be something like openssl-0.9.8e. So CentOS/RHEL 5 users are safe from this vulnerability.

See Also: