OpenSSL VS Bcrypt

Today, April 7th, 2024, marks the 10-year anniversary since CVE-2014-0160 was published. This security vulnerability known as "Heartbleed" was a flaw in the OpenSSL cryptography software, the most popular option to implement Transport Layer Security (TLS). In more layman's terms, if you type https:// in your browser address bar, chances are high that you are interacting with OpenSSL.

At this point I pretty much understand the entire process on how the xz backdoor came to be: its execution stages, extraction from binary "test" files etc. But one thing puzzles me: how can the ifunc mechanism be used to replace something like RSA_public_decrypt? Granted this probably stems from my lack of understanding of ifunc, but I was under the impression that in order for the ifunc mechanism to work in your code, you have to explicitly mark specific function with multiple implementations with __attribute__ ((ifunc ("the_resolver_function"))). Looking at the source code of the RSA function in question, ifunc attribute isn't present:

https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/master/crypto/rsa/rsa_crpt.c#L51

So how does the backdoor actually replace the call? Does this means that the ifunc mechanism can be used to override pretty much anything on the system?

OpenSSL and Go crypt/tls has no support yet, so none of the webservers that depend on them support it. Apache, Nginx, and Caddy, they all need upstream ECH support first.

- https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/7482

- https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/22938

- https://github.com/golang/go/issues/63369

If I'm understanding the draft correctly, I think the webserver you're hosting your sites on would need it implemented as it requires private keys and ECH configuration. In the example of nginx since it uses openssl, openssl would need to implement it. I found an issue on their Github but it's still open: https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/7482

I confirmed that the systm was on 1.1.1f with openssl version command. Hmm...... I check the openssl version in the repo with apt list... LOL package names wernt helpful. finally went to the repo pages and found that its still on 1.1.1f, https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openssl. Meenwhile I looked up the version history on https://www.openssl.org/ and saw that 1.1.1v was released at the beginning of this month... ok. I can understand it it was out less then 30 days. I looked up when f came out, end of MARCH 2020. NEARLY 3-1/2 YEARS

This is pretty spot on, and the salt is a common practice too. There’s libraries like bcrypt that can handle this for you. I recommend watching this video as an introduction to securely storing passwords, and check the comments for some other good tips.

bcrypt is a library and algorithm which we used above. This is the same code which is used by passlib and there's not really a reason to use this low-level library.