Month: June 2014

I mentioned a couple items in the Security Monitoring webinar today:

• The Heartbleed bug arose from a reasonable-sounding feature request. The client could send periodic “heart beat” requests to the server to see if the connection is still alive. But it was implemented very badly, leading to the Heartbleed bug.

• How bad was it? Bruce Schneier’s blog leads with this sentence, “Heartbleed is a catastrophic bug in OpenSSL.” Read the remainder at Schneier on Security: Heartbleed The official Heartbleed site also gives good information.

• The best explanation for non-techies of the Heartbleed bug comes (as always) from XCKD

• Please contact me if you would be interested in a version of the “Check SSL Certificate” probe that can run on Windows. I will collect these requests to judge the interest in the probe.

Thanks to all who attended!

Do you know when your SSL certificate expires for critical services, such as your public web server or the on-line store? Are you sure that someone’s aware of the cutoff date?

The Check SSL Certificate probe for InterMapper will continually check a web server’s SSL certificate, and give you a warning when the expiration date is less than 30 days away, or go to critical when it’s less than 10 days away. The probe runs every six hours, so it won’t tax your server.

Download from Github.com/blueberryhillsoftware

Instructions:

• You will also need the Nagios check_ssl_cert plugin (.zip archive)
• Expand the archive, and copy the check_ssl_cert file from the archive to the top level of the InterMapper Settings/Tools folder.
• Ensure that the check_ssl_cert file is executable (chmod +x check_ssl_cert)
• Use File -> Import Probe… to import the InterMapper probe
• Add a device to your map with IP address/DNS name of your SSL server.

The probe will query the SSL server and examine its certificate.

Note: The Nagios plugin only works on Linux, Unix or OSX that can execute a /bin/sh command. If you would like a Windows version of this probe, please contact me