What the heartbleed bug looks like on the wire

The "heartbleed" bug appears to grab "uninitialized memory". For typical web servers using OpenSSL, that likely means memory dealing with recent web requests. In the attached screen shot, we ran a test tool against Flickr (which is still vulnerable). Notice that it gives us a person's session cookie (which I've cropped here to avoid harming the innocent). By copying this cookie into a browser ("sidejacking") we can in theory gain temporary access to this person's account.

A picture of the packets sent to test/exploit the HeartBleed bug.
At the bottom, you see part of a person's session cookie.

I think for any particular connection, the chance of getting a "private key" is very low. But of course, if it's only a 1-in-a-million chance, then it's still too high, as attackers can create millions of connections to a server. Also, the impact for a large hosting site like Flickr would be huge, impacting hundreds of millions of connections. In other words, if "risk = likelihood * impact", then the risk of a private-key disclosure is the same as the risk of a cookie disclosure: the impact of disclosing the private-key effects all hundred million customers with a one-in-a-million likelihood, whereas the impact of a session key disclosure effects only one customer, with a greater than 50% chance per coonection.