Information about HeartBleed and IIS

The Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL (CVE-2014-0160) has received a significant amount of attention recently. While the discovered issue is specific to OpenSSL, many customers are wondering whether this affects Microsoft’s offerings, specifically Windows and IIS.  Microsoft Account and Microsoft Azure, along with most Microsoft Services, were not impacted by the OpenSSL vulnerability. Windows’ implementation of SSL/TLS was also not impacted.

We also want to assure our customers that default configurations of Windows do not include OpenSSL, and are not impacted by this vulnerability.   Windows comes with its own encryption component called Secure Channel (a.k.a. SChannel), which is not susceptible to the Heartbleed vulnerability.

This applies to all Windows operating systems and IIS versions, up to and including IIS 8.5 running on any of the following operating systems:

•             Windows Server 2003 and 2003R2
•             Windows Server 2008
•             Windows Server 2008R2
•             Windows Server 2012
•             Windows Server 2012R2

Customers running software on Windows that uses OpenSSL instead of SChannel (for example, running the Windows version of Apache), may be vulnerable.  We recommend that all customers who may be vulnerable follow the guidance from their software distribution provider.  For more information and corrective action guidance, please see the information from US Cert here.