Update (Dec 7th): an F5 engineer commented on the TLS WG mailing list describing the internals of the hang bug. Based on this, we realised that it would be possible to work around the issue by padding ClientHello messages of a certain size. We now have a design for doing this, it's implemented in Chrome and it appears to be working! So, while you should always keep software up to date, it appears that the Internet can dodge this bug!

If you use F5/BIG-IP devices to terminate SSL connections, please update the firmware on the things! We're trying to run an Internet here and old versions of these devices are a real problem for deploying new TLS features. You need to be running at least version 10.2.4 (as far as I know), but running the latest version is generally good advice.

If you just try to connect to these sites with a recent version of OpenSSL, you should find that the connection hangs - which is terrible. We can detect a server that returns an error, but hanging the connection isn't something we can generally work around.

$ openssl version OpenSSL 1.0.1e 11 Feb 2013 $ openssl s_client -connect stubhub.com:443 CONNECTED(00000003) hangs! $ openssl s_client -connect stubhub.com:443 -tls1 New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is AES256-SHA Server public key is 2048 bit Secure Renegotiation IS NOT supported Compression: NONE Expansion: NONE ...

I did have a long list of major sites that were affected by this issue here. I've removed it because some of them had updated and, because of the update at the top, it's no longer a crippling problem.