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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

One of us misunderstands what happened.

> Chances are it wasn't a domain that was leaking information - though we don't know as there's no publicly accessible list and no way to tell if they had the buffer overrun features active.

As far as I my understanding goes domains that had the features on were leaking the data of other domains. So it's near impossible to tell who was affected.

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You understand it right, but I think you get the conclusions wrong. If a site didn't have said features active, information from it could have leaked via other sites that had them on, and could be in archives of those other sites (= so it still should rotate secrets where necessary). But the archive of the page itself can be kept safely, since without the buggy features no leaked data from other sites has been included in it.

Ah, I get it now, thanks for explaining.

The key bit is that your page needs to have been in memory in that process for it to leak. So malformed pages that use the affected services would leak data from other pages that use those services.

Wouldn't this be hard to exploit from an attackers poitn of view? I mean there is no way to know what data was currently in RAM, it is at best a blind attack.

But it's a blind attack that is much more likely to hit big players.

And seeing as cloudflare has some of the biggest pipes on the net, it would be easy to saturate a pipe to gather as much data as possible from any sites you can find that are affected.

If I understand correctly, you could literally keep smashing f5 on an affected page and get a different chunk of memory every time. An attacker could have potentially collected a lot very quickly with a simple script.

That's, from what I understand, completely correct. Not only that, but because of the nature of the flaw, it's not clear to me that the attackers would be generating any real anomalies by doing so. They're just fetching a particular pattern of otherwise non-notable web pages.

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