Use Gauntlt to test for Heartbleed

Heartbleed is making headlines and everyone is making a mad dash to patch and rebuild. Good, you should. This is definitely a nightmare scenario but instead of using more superlatives to scare you, I thought it would be good to provide a pragmatic approach to test and detect the issue.

@FiloSottile wrote a tool in Go to check for the Heartbleed vulnerability. It was provided as a website in addition to a tool, but when I tried to use the site, it seemed over capacity. Probably because we are all rushing to find out if our systems are vulnerable. To get around this, you can build the tool locally from source using the install instructions on the repo. You need Go installed and the GOPATH environment variable set.

go get github.com/FiloSottile/Heartbleed
go install github.com/FiloSottile/Heartbleed

Once it is installed, you can easily check to see if your site is vulnerable.
Heartbleed example.com:443

Cool! But, lets do one better and implement this as a gauntlt attack so that we can make sure we don’t have regressions and so that we can automate this a bit further. Gauntlt is a rugged testing framework that I helped create. The main goal for gauntlt is to facilitate security testing early in the development lifecycle. It does so by wrapping security tools with sane defaults and uses Gherkin (Given, When, Then) syntax so it easily understood by dev, security and ops groups.

In the latest version of gauntlt (gauntlt 1.0.9) there is support for Heartbleed–it should be noted that gauntlt doesn’t install tools, so you will still have to follow the steps above if you want the gauntlt attacks to work. Lets check for Heartbleed using gauntlt.

gem install gauntlt
gauntlt --version

You should see 1.0.9. Now lets write a gauntlt attack. Create a text file called heartbleed.attack and add the following contents:

@slow
Feature: Test for the Heartbleed vulnerability

Given "Heartbleed" is installed
And the following profile:
| name | value |
| domain | example.com |
When I launch a "Heartbleed" attack with:
"""
Heartbleed <domain>:443
"""
Then the output should contain "SAFE"

You now have a working gauntlt attack that can be hooked into your CI/CD pipeline that will test for Heartbleed. To see this example attack file on github, go to https://github.com/gauntlt/gauntlt/blob/master/examples/heartbleed/heartbleed.attack.

To run the attack

$ gauntlt ./heartbleed.attack

You should see output like this
$ gauntlt ./examples/heartbleed/heartbleed.attack
Using the default profile...
@slow
Feature: Test for the Heartbleed vulnerability

1 scenario (1 passed)
4 steps (4 passed)
0m3.223s

Good luck! Let me (@wickett) know if you have any problems.