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hands-on lab

OWASP Exercises: Exploiting the Heartbleed Bug

Difficulty: Intermediate
Duration: Up to 1 hour
Students: 1,268
Rating: 4.7/5
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Description

The Heartbleed bug is a serious vulnerability that was found to exist on webservers using the OpenSSL cryptographic library, a popular implementation of the TLS protocol for webservers. This exploit will work on any unpatched webservers running an OpenSSL instance in either client or server mode. The vulnerability was disclosed in 2014, although the bug was found to have been present since a software patch in September 2012. It allows attackers to perform a buffer overflow attack, where they can read more information than they should be allowed to and can, therefore, read the entire contents of a webserver's memory buffer - an area where the server stores data ready for processing or that is yet to be overwritten by other processes. This could include passwords, key strings, hashes and all manner of other sensitive information that other users are inputting onto the server during normal use.

In this lab, you will perform the Heartbleed attack using the MetaSploit Framework in order to dump the contents of a vulnerable webserver using an unpatched version of OpenSSL.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this lab you will be able to:

  • Set up MetaSploit to exploit a server vulnerable to Heartbleed attacks

Intended Audience

This lab is intended for:

  • Individuals who want to learn how to defend their servers against Heartbleed attacks
  • Security engineers who want to understand whether their servers are vulnerable to attacks
  • Individuals who want to understand how a Heartbleed attack is performed on a server

Prerequisites

This lab has no prerequisites.

Updates

September 21st, 2021 - Updated HyperV VMs to not used save state to avoid an issue with Azure VMs in the same SKU not all having the same processor features

September 7th, 2021 - Upgraded underlying disk, and Kali Hyper-V VM configuration for improved performance

July 9th, 2020 - Enabled direct browser RDP connection for a streamlined experience

Covered topics

Security attacks
Security
Hands-on Lab UUID

Lab steps

Load the Virtual Machines (Kali & Heartbleed)
Navigate to the Victim Website
Test to Confirm the Webserver is Vulnerable
Create Data to Extract from the Server
Configure MetaSploit to Exploit the Heartbleed Server
Exploit the Heartbleed Server

Lab Rules