This is a little long in the tooth, but I’m caught playing catch-up on a number of things, so apologies on my part.

As most will be aware, there has been a lot of coverage about the Heartbleed OpenSSL vulnerability in the course of the last week, and the impact it may have had over the last two years in exposing what should have been secure information.

The vulnerability is so-called because it affects an extension to SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) which engineers dubbed Heartbeat. It is a server-side exploit which could affect almost any system running any version of OpenSSL from the past 2 years, and allows an attacker to gain control of up to 64kB of the server’s working memory at a time, enabling them to eavesdrop communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users.

Because of the widespread nature of the issue and the concerns it raised, the Lab issued a blog post on the matter on Thursday April 10th, which reads in full:

Many of you may have read about the Heartbleed SSL vulnerability that is still affecting many Internet sites. You do not need to take extra action to secure your Second Life password if you have not used the same password on other websites. Your Second Life password was not visible via Heartbleed server memory exposure. No secondlife.com site that accepts passwords had the vulnerable SSL heartbeat feature enabled. If you used the same password for Second Life that you used on a third-party site, and if that third-party site may have been affected by the vulnerability, you should change your password. Supporting sites such as Second Life profiles are hosted on cloud hosting services. Some of these sites were previously vulnerable to Heartbleed, which may have exposed one of these servers’ certificates. As an extra precaution, we are in the process of replacing our SSL certificates across the board. This change will be fully automatic in standard web browsers. Thank you for your interest in keeping Second Life safe! Due to the weekend, there has been no further news as to whether the Lab has completed replacing the SSL certificates for those services which may have been exposed. Hopefully there will be a further update on Monday April 14th. In the meantime, if you have used the same password for SL that you used on a third-party website and wish to change your SL password as advised in the blog post, you may want to refer to the Lab’s password protection page on the wiki.