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Heartbleed exposes a threat where computer memory for a vulnerable could be exposed.

Consider an adversary with access to all cipher text input and output of your server (ISP, government, local network peers). If they had access to previous HTTPS communications (yesterday, a year ago) on your server and now get access to its memory, would they be able to decrypt past messages?

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  • Patching OpenSSL alone should not be the only solution. The SSL Certs should also be regenerated.
    – kobaltz
    Apr 10, 2014 at 13:08
  • This is more of a security.SE or cryptography.SE question. This all depends on the encryption algorithm and what type of hashing was used. Also - relevant on SSL/TLS Keep in mind that SSL/TLS was not compromised, but rather the implementation of it
    – Raystafarian
    Apr 10, 2014 at 13:51
  • Not really, this fits perfectly well here; it just needs a bit of re-wording: Do I have to worry about affected sites that I used before (read weeks or months ago)?
    – Synetech
    Apr 10, 2014 at 17:20
  • @Full Decent, you may want to consider expanding the question to also include the situation in which there is no particular past wire-tapping. Then it would apply to a wider audience and garner more attention.
    – Synetech
    Apr 10, 2014 at 17:24

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For completeness (if affected in this way), I will quote http://heartbleed.com/ :

What is leaked primary key material and how to recover?

These are the crown jewels, the encryption keys themselves. Leaked secret keys allows the attacker to decrypt any past and future traffic to the protected services and to impersonate the service at will. Any protection given by the encryption and the signatures in the X.509 certificates can be bypassed. Recovery from this leak requires patching the vulnerability, revocation of the compromised keys and reissuing and redistributing new keys. Even doing all this will still leave any traffic intercepted by the attacker in the past still vulnerable to decryption. All this has to be done by the owners of the services.

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  • Unless, of course, the server was using perfect forward secrecy. From heartbleed.com : "Use of Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS), which is unfortunately rare but powerful, should protect past communications from retrospective decryption."
    – heavyd
    Apr 10, 2014 at 14:13

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