Right, so it's not just git, it's a bunch of system-provided utilities; macOS trusts bad certs, and these utils that trust the OS are affected. I use homebrew for my git and curl but haven't yet checked to confirm whether that matters here.
Kind of outrageous that Apple's guidance is to edit the cert chain manually, and to expect that subsequent OS updates may revert your mitigation, reintroducing the vulnerability (as happened at least once so far).
Homebrew ships its own CA bundle so its own curl, Git, etc. are not affected. But the system versions of those tools will continue to be affected until Apple patches their own bundle.
That MacOS hasn't removed from OS-level /etc/ssl seems like a big deal, affecting more than just OS-supplied git. Is /etc/certs not used by most graphical Mac software, I guess? The chaotic state of OS-level cert management, on Linux as well, is pretty dismaying.
If Apple is still trying to brand themselves as security-forward, you'd think removing the revoked CA certs from /etc in a system update would be a pretty easy thing to do?
I don’t think it’s gross incompetence, since they documented the steps to remove. They may have some unexpected dependency on the file? Looks mysterious from the outside.
People would have to use it in some drastic catastrophic way for them to force it out in an update, which they might push it out in the next macOS update, which don't come nearly as frequently as Windows bloatware updates do.
This seems important enough to just send out a patch update that removes the cert and does nothing else. But apparently at least a couple people at Apple disagree; or, something I'm not familiar with makes that type of update impossible.
> Is /etc/certs not used by most graphical Mac software, I guess?
Correct, those usually use Apple's networking APIs which all go through their security stack, which already picked up the OCSP revocation within about 2 hours in most cases.
this only affects terminal apps, which the vast majority of MacOS users don't run; the fix for graphical Mac software is already patched
my guess is their thinking is that if you're running those apps on Mac, you're a developer or know what you're doing, and can edit /etc/ssl/cert.pem until they push an update
they also have to consider that such users may have custom changes to their cert.pem file, and they probably don't want to rush an update that would potentially fu-bar those changes
I'm not being sarcastic when I say that Apple should copy Windows Update, I have no idea how they have got this far without a method to add small patches outside monolithic OS updates.
On Mac, some command-line tools included with macOS or the Xcode Command Line Tools (including curl, git, python3, ruby, perl, and openssl) check certificates against /etc/ssl/cert.pem. For certificates that chain to a root CA certificate in this file, these tools don't check Apple's block or whether the certificate has been revoked. This file will be updated in a future macOS update. If you use these tools and don't want to wait for the update, you can remove root CA certificates from the file.
Why are they not just pushing out the update asap? Unless they're relying on the compromised certs, then it feels it should be incredibly trivial to push
Because to Apple once you open a terminal you leave the supported world behind. This is a standard thing for them. Apple is not really a UNIX vendor and certainly not a Linux vendor: they sell macOS which is primarily a consumer OS and has its own APIs for everything.
Tools common on Linux like curl and git come with the OS basically for developer convenience. Apple doesn't write those programs, they don't use Apple's APIs or platform features, and thus in some sense you aren't really meant to use them in Apple's eyes. Ports of UNIX CLI tools exist in a kind of semi-supported netherworld on macOS. They run but they aren't fully integrated or supported parts of the OS.
The issue might be Root CA vs intermediates. The root CA that eMudhra rolls upto may be used for other intermediates which were not compromised or revoked. Removing the root CA will mean that these valid certificates no longer work.
This is technically a problem in the CLI - it needs to support revocations properly, not rely on root CA verification only. I’m not sure though whether there’s a standardised mechanism (that Apple supports) for CLIs.
> These steps affect every tool that uses /etc/ssl/cert.pem. Afterward, tools that use only this file might not be able to verify some websites whose certificates chain to these root CA certificates through intermediate CAs that weren't affected.
In pracitce, those root CAs have already been removed in major browsers. If your server uses them, you would likely have needed to migrate to another root already.
Apple’s own security framework is supported by curl with OpenSSL or GnuTLS (build with ./configure --with-apple-sectrust). That blocks the intermediate certificates via the same mechanism Safari uses for example.
Not sure why macOS doesn’t ship such a build of curl.
I think since 10.15 the built-in command line tools in MacOS are there mostly for backwards compatibility. This was clearly communicated about scripting languages, but there was a feeling back then that this was about the whole lot (all cli tools).
Theory: Apple are moving away from user-controllable development tools, towards an AI-hosted application development framework which removes the divide between user and developer, and thus the need for specialized developer tools.
The writing is on the wall for the command line tools.
(We can already see this tooling devaluation happening all over the place. Apple have their variant of this response to the AI tooling-paradigm tsunami…)
Precisely because the agent is becoming the user of the command line tools now, these are all being abstracted behind an interface which blurs the developer/user requirement…
The original question is, why aren’t Apple fixing the CA problems for the command line tools (whereas they have done it for .app’s such as Safari), and the reasoning is, because the user will just have to fix it themselves, because Apple don’t care about the command line users - they see that these command line tools are, indeed, becoming the front-line for agentic development, so .. presumably, they have an .app bundle which does away with this problem, to be shipped on the horizon ...
They have been treating the command line tools like the bastard child of their software portfolio, and then there’s that whole drive to remove the Unix’ness of MacOS .. Swift/SwiftUI is a drive away from lower tooling layers, and .. there is no doubt they already have a developer agent of their own, internally, pushing their abilities to make projections of hardware requirements and specifications for the next 2 - 5 years …
I’m not saying they’re going to deprecate XCode today, but I do believe they will “agent’ize” Developer Tooling drastically in the next year or so. Agents are becoming the most important user of command line tools.
Because they have to, in order to catch up with NVidia, their only real competition. If you want to understand why I think that, its because I have been developing and deploying cross-platform Linux-centric (but MacOS and Windows targeting) applications, mostly for the ARM platform but also with Intel (SIMD on both) .. for the past few months, and I haven’t touched an IDE in a month. On DGX Spark. Which turns out is a truly, utterly, mind-blowingly great platform to do cross platform high performance application development…
Apple has pretty well always got users to do things via the GUI – look at the Lisa and Classic MacOS.
CLI is just a thing that NeXT had and even that made it easy to use GUI tools.
Xcode is a GUI tool – it happens to expose some cli tools but they could be covered up – however some developers would complain a lot so I don't see that happeneing.
The command line tooling lets you/AI manage a lot of your app store interactions though. It's much easier to use that way then trying to deal with the Steamworks UI and doing things manually.
> A flat cert.pem file (or similar) can't say "distrust this intermediate".
Why does that matter in this case? Can't this be fully mitigated with next to no collateral damage just by removing the trusted roots that signed them?
It seems like we've all just... given up on certificate revocation? CRLs and OCSP were designed for exactly this sort of thing, but they both seen to have been abandoned as unworkable with no replacement.
While there is no proof that anyone knew about these weak keys for the year and a half that they were trusted by virtually everybody, and there's no evidence of MITM attacks happening in the wild because of it, you can imagine the payoff that a three letter agency would have if, for even 10 days, there was an opportunity to harvest credentials from important people in high places.
I have no evidence or proof, but I am convinced this wrap/unwrap key generation debacle was intentional and the weak keys were discovered and kept secret by the agencies or governments and used to exploit their adversaries.
You don't need to perform a traditional MITM attack _if you own the airport_ or you _own the free public wifi_. The traffic can be harvested in clear text and we have to come to terms with the _remote possibility_ that this was going on for over a year and a half. If not that long, then certainly for the past 10 days.
Don't underplay it either though: with a compromised but unrevoked signing cert all it takes is a successful phish, or some problem to allow DNS poisoning (or hack a wireless AP, or …) to direct you to a fake site or (potentially worse as it might be less immediately noticeable and could quietly collect credentials/data for a while) send your automated tools to a malicious API.
It may not be directly exploitable on its own, which is the impression some reports give, but it is a serious hole to leave open especially with the current rate of old security issues being found, as it could be _incredibly_ useful to a malicious actor as part of an exploit chain.
It's pretty easy to compromise things like McDonalds or Starbucks WiFi hotspots though, just setup a Pineapple with the right SSIDs and a 5G modem, funnel your target domains through your mitmproxy via the DHCP DNS server you're providing, and that's basically it.
I agree it's not PHP2Shell, but its certainly not being "way overblown" here.
I think they're saying you create your own malicious wifi network and people will unintentionally connect to it. This network specifies your malicious DNS server via DHCP, and everything looks secure to the client. I think the main issue with this in practice is that all the major browsers have been updated to not trust these certs.
So you target some host like ssh.dev.azure.com, find all the hooks in the proper repo the client is trying to access, make a new commit that puts your persistence payload in one of them that you expect will be executed soon, this script can additionally "correct" the git state when it finally runs, and moves its persistence to some more appropriate location.
Users will be none-the-wiser because they're not accessing these hosts through a web browser, and you net a few more compromised hosts in your inventory.
Yeah also got to be lucky that the users are using https and not ssh. You're very limited in what you can mitm, you'll be trivially detected by patched devices (though maybe not acted on because nobody is the wiser), but then you'll need to serve objects with common/conflicting hashes -- fixing up that state synchronisation (what you call "correct") to then do nefarious things is not trivial at all. Extremely difficult to pull off successfully for git anyways or to do it in stealth.
They wouldn't. A device like the Pineapple broadcasts its own copycat wireless signal and tricks unsuspecting clients to connect to it thinking it's the real one.
Edit: Holy moly we all jumped on this comment at the same time didn't we.
It’s extremely common to see other Macs pop up in the ‘network’ panel in Finder in the independent coffee shops around me. I imagine they’re just signing up for a business plan and using the routers the ISP gives them with a custom SSID and password.
They don't need to, a Pineapple (or anything else that can run a wireless access point, you could do this with a laptop) just needs to advertise the expected SSID and do so with a stronger signal than the official ones for people's devices to connect to it instead of the actual network.
The near-universal use of TLS and the absurd ceremony we go through to ship root CAs everywhere is all premised on the idea that MITMs are not terribly difficult.
The entire reason one can rest easy as they connect to their coffee shop's WPA2-PSK network, is the security provided by TLS.
And if you don't think an ISP or agency would abuse this if it could be done undetectably then you haven't been paying attention these last 20 years (hence why DoH is now a thing).
Appealing to complexity is always fun. Just throwing "a lot" in there for good measure and you won't have to think about practical security implications.
The window of opportunity to MITM has passed. If you attempted an MITM from an easy vantage such as telco, ISP, or public wifi you'd be trivially detected as a significant portion of devices are patched, including on these unpatched macs as only the *nix commands are affected and not app bundles.
The TLS trust chain is the last defense against MITM attacks. The prevalence of MITM attacks is in fact the very reason TLS exists. I'd say it's a lot worse than PHP2Shell because it doesn't only affect poorly maintained servers, but potentially ALL credentials and secrets a user sends over a compromised network with compromised CAs on their device.
This is way worse than PHP2Shell in scope of impact and its effects will stick around for much longer. Well, as long as the validity period of the compromised certs anyway
> You have to compromise a lot to be able to make a MITM here.
It's trivially easy to mount an ARP spoofing attack. I did that at school two decades ago and on-the-fly rewrote <img src=...> to hardcore porn images for funsies.
mitmproxy [1], a popular toolkit for making that easy, has the option to generate "eMudhra" certificates on the fly now.
It is trivially easy to compromise things, all you need is physical access to the network.
Do you have a cell phone? Do you use Wifi? Do you use an ISP who, in the last few decades, has performed any form of interception or traffic-tampering?
I hazard that the answer to all three of those is "yes".
You don't have physical access to the network, doesn't mean other actor aren't here. Working for providers, governments, or being able to impersonate them. This is a serious issue, it shouldn't be downplayed.
If you think it's not that important, it becomes a critic about TLS and basically saying that ciphers for web traffic are useless.
Public wifi hotspots tend to give you that opportunity. Large commercial hotspots have inter-client communication blocked, but your average coffee shop style network? You're lucky if it even is an isolated VLAN from the shop's cash register lol.
Except it won't impact gmail unless you're accessing it through curl. The browsers already distrusted the compromised intermediates via CRL within hours of disclosure, and removed the affected root via update.
Sure practicality is always an issue. It's an issue that attackers will go to great lengths to resolve too.
What if it's the Starbucks at 1730 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20006 for an extended period of time? Compounded with other security issues like password reuse...
We can always draw a line and say, "that's not practical". The assessment an attacker is likely to do is going to be "is this practical inside my budget for the value I hope to acquire?" or maybe even just "waow, lulz".
I have, but good luck predicting where I'm going to have my next cuppa.
Outside of petty crimes mentioned, I don't see how it could be industrially weaponised to make actual damage.
Regardless, real bad actors are busy compromising your next `npm install` anyway. Much better reward.
If they are specificly targeting you, then they probably dont need to use the coffee shop. The coffee shop is for low skill attackers targeting people at random.
If someone has it in for you and hired a high skill attacker, its not a stretch to imagine they compromised your home network.
> good luck predicting where I’m going to have my next cuppa.
Why are you assuming there isn’t someone else trying to hack you at the next cafe? Actual damage can happen one person at a time, and can occasionally lead to larger scale compromises. Randomizing your location isn’t going to reduce your risk. Now that everyone who’s paying attention knows they can MITM your Mac, you shouldn’t trust any network.
Client isolation is very common on wireless and wired LANs these days in enterprise and guest network environments. You also have tools like dynamic arp inspection to block poisoning attempts via the network switch.
If you get past all of that, you still need a victim who is actively using a cli tool on macOS using https.
It’s not impossible, but the conditions are much more specific than those needed to inject porn into a webpage on a poorly configured school network in 2006.
…and yet it doesn't help at all if a laptop sees an AP with strong signal in its vicinity and connects to that instead of the meticulously configured AP that sits behind the counter with a slightly weaker signal.
You’re not actually making the point you think you are. This comes back to the original comment stating you need to compromise a lot to MITM here.
So you need to somehow trick macOS into remotely connecting to the wrong bssid, and then arp poison a user who happens to be using a macOS cli tool that’s using https.
Go to a random coffee shop that allows people to work at the tables, and you’ll find a few developers with MacBooks there pretty soon. They will be connected to the local hotspot, which either has no password at all, or WPA2 with the password written on a billboard behind the counter. Spin up an evil twin, then wait for the connections to roll in.
It's actually worse: Installing the 27.2 update after manually cleaning out /etc/ssl/cert.pem will revert those changes and put the eMudhra CA back in.
Was thinking the same. My assumption would've been that this would have been a normal and routine enough of an operation to be able to push through without needing a separate RC process.
There must be a long list of things that aren’t fully patched for this yet, on laptops, on servers. Think of packages that ship their own trust anchors, isn’t there a rust crate that compiles with some root certs embedded?
On one hand there’s unmaintained packages that won’t update dependencies. On the other hand, fixed dependencies did not necessarily backport to all possible versions in the wild, making update as a fix unviable for those.
Anyone running Intel macbook because Homebrew dropped support for them because Apple dropped support for them. You can still use Homebrew but it means rebuilding from source. I downloaded uv recently and it took about 8 hours to fully install because it had to build llvm, uv, some other stuff all from source.
Heaps of us. I'd been using it for years before Homebrew even existed and I never felt that any of the problems that Homebrew purported to solve were real.
I'm not that familiar with the MacOSx system, but do they have a "minor" update path that I'm not aware of? It seems that everything is an 8gb update. Is that why this update isn't getting put out?
To get mine to finally update, I had to leave my laptop plugged in for a couple of hours. There’s some trustd process that runs every so often; I couldn’t figure out a way to manually trigger the sync.
Can we get a title edit? OP’s title implies this is a Git bug, but the bug applies to half of macOS, including curl, openssl, python, perl, and ruby, and to only the macOS version of Git. The original title is less misleading, but personally I’d have titled it something like “macOS still trusts the compromised eMudhra certificates in git, curl, openssl, python3, perl, ruby, more”.
Running (uname -a) Darwin arrakis.local 27.2.0 Darwin Kernel Version 27.2.0: Wed Oct 14 23:47:07 PDT 2026; root:xnu-13432.41.4~25/RELEASE_ARM64_T8132 arm64, I get the following for both:
curl: (60) SSL certificate OpenSSL verify result: unable to get local issuer certificate (20)
More details here: https://curl.se/docs/sslcerts.html
curl failed to verify the legitimacy of the server and therefore could not
establish a secure connection to it. To learn more about this situation and
how to fix it, please visit the webpage mentioned above.
$ uname -a
Darwin MacBook 27.2.0 Darwin Kernel Version 27.2.0: Wed Oct 14 23:47:21 PDT 2026; root:xnu-13432.41.4~25/RELEASE_ARM64_T6030 arm64 arm Darwin
$ which curl
/usr/bin/curl
$ curl https://dv-g3b-emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/
Your client successfully connected to the site. That's bad!
Not sure what Linux offers that's any better. Didn't Debian ship trivially weak SSH keys for over 2 years because they were trying to silence Valgrind warnings and the random maintainer had no idea what they were doing and there was no oversight or peer review whatsoever?
Besides singling out a single bug from a single distro two decades ago, Linux offers maintainers who actually care to push security fixes within a few hours of globe-spanning vulnerabilities being disclosed? Not sure how that's confusing or controversial.
> the random maintainer had no idea what they were doing
Upstream was involved in it as well. Sure it was a communication problem, but it's not like the maintainer just decided to this unilaterally. Also this WAS undefined behaviour, so from a language perspective it was already broken, even if it worked accidentally in practice.
That's one issue from one distro 18 years ago. Have there been recent things? This thread is about a today's MacOS, and an issue known publicly for more than a week.
> Well that "screw up" was so egregious that it should take at least a decade to regain any trust.
Do you use macOS? Because if you did, then how did you recover from them allowing anyone to straight-up log in as root without password? And then mess up the fix for that bug? That wasn't 2008, that was 8 years ago.
It's funny. When Apple goes in and changes peoples systems deeply without consent then it's Apple being evil. When they don't, it's Apple being evil. Heads I win, tails you lose.
Let's pretend there's a night and day difference between pushing some MP3 onto all iPhones and distrusting a chain of certs that hold the value of '4'. At minimum Apple need to revoke everywhere these joke-level certs live and as fast as possible, and on all devices which also means out of support. Breaking is acceptable here as CA trust is fully compromised.
That page is an insult to their customers. So what, if I want to be protected from a security issue you acknowledge, I'll need to make modifications to my system configuration?
It’s interesting they call out as “optional” removing sectigo roots.
If you’re not removing them you better be sure anything that runs on the system has full revocation support including intermediates. Which is.. kind of an impossible thing to assert as true. Which is why most trust stores just removed that as well last week.
I use SSH for things which are private or which I may want to push to, but I use HTTPS for everything I just need to download. SSH typically requires that you create an account with whatever the git host is and upload your public key.
SSH in typical use is not vulnerable to a compromised root certificate, instead it's "just" vulnerable to you having no idea whether you can trust that host key or not, so you just blindly say yes and hope for the best. At least if the key changes, you'll know something was wrong; maybe it was this connection that got compromised, maybe it was the first connection that got compromised, maybe the legitimate host just rotated their keys, who knows. SSH security against MITM is mostly based on lack of motivated attackers and wishful thinking.
Its no more wishful than expecting a root of trust to stay trustworthy or expecting a trusted name to consistently resolve to the same party.
And there's a lack of motivated attackers for a reason, the attack scales poorly. Maybe you can bamboozle a target or two, but if you go for hundreds, somebody's gonna start wondering what's up with the keys. If you're trying to take over the world, or sell to somebody who is, you're better off focusing on compromising a root of trust or tampering with name resolution, because attacks like that are sustainable at scale.
Albeit helpful, the site is kinda cringe.
It leaves a bad taste in my mouth knowing that the author is affiliated with Mozilla.
Of course they would throw shades at Apple. That being said the situation isn't ideal and I'm sure Apple would have shipped an update if it were easy and warranted.
Affiliations aside I think I'm happy to see shade thrown at anyone who hasn't bothered to even issue a patch 10 days after what has been one of the biggest news weeks in security in memory.
Fwiw, as critical as I am of Mozilla in recent years, they (along with the Chrome team) have been pretty solid on this whole debacle over the last week. Apple has been far from the only target of their collective shade-throwing.
A concern for me on this site is that they give the shell commands to edit the /etc/ssl file on their site, instead of just making the Apple link (which they also list) as authoritative on the matter. I don't think users should get in the habit of cut/pasting sudo enable shell one-liners from "random" websites, especially and specifically when the vendor has the very same commands in their published fixed for the issue. In short, this site should have just said "go get the fix from apple".
Your apps and browser don't trust them. Why should your CLI. It's easy and warranted for Apple and look how much cash and engineers they have.
Apple should publish a hotfix now. Work on a better solution in the long-term. They just don't care about security for developers is my take (it's like a niche group for them?)
I have been wondering recently if Apple are bothering to maintain the Unix side of the OS. Seems like they occasionally remove or deprecate stuff but don’t put any serious effort into maintenance.
Microsoft had a small golden age with Azure and Windows 10, and now they are going right back into a Vista-era-like rot. Github is down an awful lot. The reliability is worse than the product I work on for work by like 2 orders of magnitude and we have no ops team. It's a joke.
Windows 11 is awful, lots of the fixes and modernization started in windows 10 has totally stalled, leaving users with 5 different places to change a setting instead of the one old place or one new place. Look how many different UI's there are to adjust sound card / sound settings or display settings. It's a complete mess. Their attempts to jump into the AI game have been a complete joke, despite already having integrated Cortana years ago. Putting Cortana on an llm is such an obvious thing to do, and they already did so much work to make that fully integrated into windows and force it on everyone even though it was trash, and now it's still trash and they don't seem to be able to adapt at all.
Now they can't respond to a complete insecurity in one of their major products in weeks? Why do they even validate certs? Why doesn't revocation work in their app? I don't think they can really be trusted at this point.
(on linux you always have the update-ca-certificates command that downloads the root certificates from a trusted™ source. but sure, it will not help, if each command starts to bring their own ca package :)
Exactly, so the title wrongly frames git as trusting certs that it shouldn't, when it's correctly trusting the system certs, and MacOS is wrongly trusting certs.
Yes, and that makes not dealing with this issue worse on Apple's part. If MacOS' setup somehow doesn't allow untangling a (still deemed trustworthy?!?) root certificate issued by eMudhra from the broken intermediate certificates, then revoke that whole chain including the root & accept collateral damage.
Failing that just provides an incentive for apps to do their own chain-of-trust implementations. Which like you said is not the way to go.
The problem is macOS has two system CA stores, keychain and /etc/ssl/cert.pem.
That is unequivocally bad, similar to Java which ships its own keystore.jks and many applications shipping its own copy on top of that. True nightmare fodder.
It's also an indictment of Apple's relationship to open source software. Never mind contributing back to upstream, they haven't even made the change in their own fork to support their own keychain.
> keystores in every single container, nested keystores within that
At least for that, in $OLDJOB I went and created a new keystore.jks myself to account for an internal CA, so my successors can just update that file, restart the containers and that's it...
Because it isn't got specifically, it is anything that uses the installation of OpenSSL provided by Apple as part of macOS (at least is my understanding).
The problem is that the title implies that it's somehow the fault of the package. That's it, that's the problem; the title is disingenuous in its claim.
"Ten days later, Apple Image Viewer on macOS still trusts the compromised eMudhra certificates" doesn't sound as catchy, but is equally correct because the apps use system CA.
"Ten days later, macOS and all applications that rely on it still trust the compromised eMudhra certificates" would have been a better title.
(Source: I am one of Homebrew’s maintainers.)
I would've preferred a doc or a code repo link as a source. Otherwise, this just reads like a brag. A decent one, to be fair :)
(Sorry if you thought it was a brag, it’s just supposed to be context so that everybody is on the same page about the reason for a comment.)
But instead the Apple fanboys will be out in force to tell us why actually its a good thing for Apple to leave parts of the OS insecure.
If Apple is still trying to brand themselves as security-forward, you'd think removing the revoked CA certs from /etc in a system update would be a pretty easy thing to do?
I don’t think it’s gross incompetence, since they documented the steps to remove. They may have some unexpected dependency on the file? Looks mysterious from the outside.
Correct, those usually use Apple's networking APIs which all go through their security stack, which already picked up the OCSP revocation within about 2 hours in most cases.
my guess is their thinking is that if you're running those apps on Mac, you're a developer or know what you're doing, and can edit /etc/ssl/cert.pem until they push an update
they also have to consider that such users may have custom changes to their cert.pem file, and they probably don't want to rush an update that would potentially fu-bar those changes
Pretty much every developer on mac should probably run their patch.
Tools common on Linux like curl and git come with the OS basically for developer convenience. Apple doesn't write those programs, they don't use Apple's APIs or platform features, and thus in some sense you aren't really meant to use them in Apple's eyes. Ports of UNIX CLI tools exist in a kind of semi-supported netherworld on macOS. They run but they aren't fully integrated or supported parts of the OS.
This is technically a problem in the CLI - it needs to support revocations properly, not rely on root CA verification only. I’m not sure though whether there’s a standardised mechanism (that Apple supports) for CLIs.
> These steps affect every tool that uses /etc/ssl/cert.pem. Afterward, tools that use only this file might not be able to verify some websites whose certificates chain to these root CA certificates through intermediate CAs that weren't affected.
Not sure why macOS doesn’t ship such a build of curl.
So the only way to fix apps that don’t handle revocation of intermediates (eg the ones that only look at certs.pem) is to revoke the root.
The writing is on the wall for the command line tools.
(We can already see this tooling devaluation happening all over the place. Apple have their variant of this response to the AI tooling-paradigm tsunami…)
The original question is, why aren’t Apple fixing the CA problems for the command line tools (whereas they have done it for .app’s such as Safari), and the reasoning is, because the user will just have to fix it themselves, because Apple don’t care about the command line users - they see that these command line tools are, indeed, becoming the front-line for agentic development, so .. presumably, they have an .app bundle which does away with this problem, to be shipped on the horizon ...
I’m not saying they’re going to deprecate XCode today, but I do believe they will “agent’ize” Developer Tooling drastically in the next year or so. Agents are becoming the most important user of command line tools.
Because they have to, in order to catch up with NVidia, their only real competition. If you want to understand why I think that, its because I have been developing and deploying cross-platform Linux-centric (but MacOS and Windows targeting) applications, mostly for the ARM platform but also with Intel (SIMD on both) .. for the past few months, and I haven’t touched an IDE in a month. On DGX Spark. Which turns out is a truly, utterly, mind-blowingly great platform to do cross platform high performance application development…
CLI is just a thing that NeXT had and even that made it easy to use GUI tools.
Xcode is a GUI tool – it happens to expose some cli tools but they could be covered up – however some developers would complain a lot so I don't see that happeneing.
macOS already has the verifier needed (Security.framework/trustd path that protected Safari). It would be good if MacOS routed CLIs through it.
Why does that matter in this case? Can't this be fully mitigated with next to no collateral damage just by removing the trusted roots that signed them?
I have no evidence or proof, but I am convinced this wrap/unwrap key generation debacle was intentional and the weak keys were discovered and kept secret by the agencies or governments and used to exploit their adversaries.
You don't need to perform a traditional MITM attack _if you own the airport_ or you _own the free public wifi_. The traffic can be harvested in clear text and we have to come to terms with the _remote possibility_ that this was going on for over a year and a half. If not that long, then certainly for the past 10 days.
yeah, it's not ideal but the scale of the threat is way overblown tbh. You have to compromise a lot to be able to make a MITM here.
Let's not treat it like PHP2Shell.
It may not be directly exploitable on its own, which is the impression some reports give, but it is a serious hole to leave open especially with the current rate of old security issues being found, as it could be _incredibly_ useful to a malicious actor as part of an exploit chain.
xz-tools was only caught because it had a bug causing slow startups and someone was micro-benchmarking Postgres and decided to dive in further.
I agree it's not PHP2Shell, but its certainly not being "way overblown" here.
Users will be none-the-wiser because they're not accessing these hosts through a web browser, and you net a few more compromised hosts in your inventory.
Edit: Holy moly we all jumped on this comment at the same time didn't we.
It's good to see push back against this narrative that is trying to develop that this isn't any kind of big deal.
This has been every machine on the internet compromised for at least 12 hours and probably some that are not going to ever get patched.
This is a HUGE deal for embedded devices, we can now mitm HTTPS traffic on many embedded device running Linux produced between 2018 and now.
The entire reason one can rest easy as they connect to their coffee shop's WPA2-PSK network, is the security provided by TLS.
And if you don't think an ISP or agency would abuse this if it could be done undetectably then you haven't been paying attention these last 20 years (hence why DoH is now a thing).
So this isn't like Firesheep [0]. Yes, there would be vulnerable traffic, like the git client this thread is discusing, but it's not "everything"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesheep
This is just an argument against TLS in general. Use plain http if you believe this.
It's trivially easy to mount an ARP spoofing attack. I did that at school two decades ago and on-the-fly rewrote <img src=...> to hardcore porn images for funsies.
mitmproxy [1], a popular toolkit for making that easy, has the option to generate "eMudhra" certificates on the fly now.
It is trivially easy to compromise things, all you need is physical access to the network.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50189232
Yeah that's not so much "trivially easy"
I hazard that the answer to all three of those is "yes".
yeah, it's trivial to punch somebody in the face in the morning, all you need to do is to be by their bad in the morning when they are waking up.
If you think it's not that important, it becomes a critic about TLS and basically saying that ciphers for web traffic are useless.
Physical access to networks isn't that hard to come by.
You'd be better off just mugging them in the parking lot.
Except it won't impact gmail unless you're accessing it through curl. The browsers already distrusted the compromised intermediates via CRL within hours of disclosure, and removed the affected root via update.
What if it's the Starbucks at 1730 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20006 for an extended period of time? Compounded with other security issues like password reuse...
We can always draw a line and say, "that's not practical". The assessment an attacker is likely to do is going to be "is this practical inside my budget for the value I hope to acquire?" or maybe even just "waow, lulz".
Regardless, real bad actors are busy compromising your next `npm install` anyway. Much better reward.
If someone has it in for you and hired a high skill attacker, its not a stretch to imagine they compromised your home network.
Why are you assuming there isn’t someone else trying to hack you at the next cafe? Actual damage can happen one person at a time, and can occasionally lead to larger scale compromises. Randomizing your location isn’t going to reduce your risk. Now that everyone who’s paying attention knows they can MITM your Mac, you shouldn’t trust any network.
If you get past all of that, you still need a victim who is actively using a cli tool on macOS using https.
It’s not impossible, but the conditions are much more specific than those needed to inject porn into a webpage on a poorly configured school network in 2006.
So you need to somehow trick macOS into remotely connecting to the wrong bssid, and then arp poison a user who happens to be using a macOS cli tool that’s using https.
Sounds pretty targeted and unlikely to happen.
I don’t think that’s either targeted or unlikely?
Source: https://mstdn.social/@jschauma/117513596272504904 https://mastodon.social/@glyph/117509558825919922
[1] https://eissing.org/icing/posts/curl-apple-sectrust/
On one hand there’s unmaintained packages that won’t update dependencies. On the other hand, fixed dependencies did not necessarily backport to all possible versions in the wild, making update as a fix unviable for those.
Upstream was involved in it as well. Sure it was a communication problem, but it's not like the maintainer just decided to this unilaterally. Also this WAS undefined behaviour, so from a language perspective it was already broken, even if it worked accidentally in practice.
I don't think its wise to make current security decisions based on screw ups from almost 2 decades ago.
I don't really care one way or another. I use Linux and I use macOS. But I'm not naive to think the security is any better in one or the other.
Do you use macOS? Because if you did, then how did you recover from them allowing anyone to straight-up log in as root without password? And then mess up the fix for that bug? That wasn't 2008, that was 8 years ago.
I don't see the point of being so fixated on that.
If that's the worst you have against Linux then it looks like it has done very well.
And not just GMail, this was virtually every service out there. From a perspective, it's laughable how bad security was back then.
Morality doesn't solely depend on action or inaction, it also matter what you act or don't act to.
Besides, how does this relate to my Linux point, where no one installs anything without you knowing it?
If you’re not removing them you better be sure anything that runs on the system has full revocation support including intermediates. Which is.. kind of an impossible thing to assert as true. Which is why most trust stores just removed that as well last week.
And there's a lack of motivated attackers for a reason, the attack scales poorly. Maybe you can bamboozle a target or two, but if you go for hundreds, somebody's gonna start wondering what's up with the keys. If you're trying to take over the world, or sell to somebody who is, you're better off focusing on compromising a root of trust or tampering with name resolution, because attacks like that are sustainable at scale.
Of course they would throw shades at Apple. That being said the situation isn't ideal and I'm sure Apple would have shipped an update if it were easy and warranted.
Fwiw, as critical as I am of Mozilla in recent years, they (along with the Chrome team) have been pretty solid on this whole debacle over the last week. Apple has been far from the only target of their collective shade-throwing.
Apple should publish a hotfix now. Work on a better solution in the long-term. They just don't care about security for developers is my take (it's like a niche group for them?)
Mozilla or not does not matter here.
This is just another one of those smells.
Windows 11 is awful, lots of the fixes and modernization started in windows 10 has totally stalled, leaving users with 5 different places to change a setting instead of the one old place or one new place. Look how many different UI's there are to adjust sound card / sound settings or display settings. It's a complete mess. Their attempts to jump into the AI game have been a complete joke, despite already having integrated Cortana years ago. Putting Cortana on an llm is such an obvious thing to do, and they already did so much work to make that fully integrated into windows and force it on everyone even though it was trash, and now it's still trash and they don't seem to be able to adapt at all.
Now they can't respond to a complete insecurity in one of their major products in weeks? Why do they even validate certs? Why doesn't revocation work in their app? I don't think they can really be trusted at this point.
It should be "Apple still ships compromised CA in /etc/". Git is just a victim like every other app using system CA
(on linux you always have the update-ca-certificates command that downloads the root certificates from a trusted™ source. but sure, it will not help, if each command starts to bring their own ca package :)
Yes, and that makes not dealing with this issue worse on Apple's part. If MacOS' setup somehow doesn't allow untangling a (still deemed trustworthy?!?) root certificate issued by eMudhra from the broken intermediate certificates, then revoke that whole chain including the root & accept collateral damage.
Failing that just provides an incentive for apps to do their own chain-of-trust implementations. Which like you said is not the way to go.
That is unequivocally bad, similar to Java which ships its own keystore.jks and many applications shipping its own copy on top of that. True nightmare fodder.
At least for that, in $OLDJOB I went and created a new keystore.jks myself to account for an internal CA, so my successors can just update that file, restart the containers and that's it...
In reality it's macOS shipping the outdated certificates, and it affects various other command-line tools, like Curl.
"Ten days later, Apple Image Viewer on macOS still trusts the compromised eMudhra certificates" doesn't sound as catchy, but is equally correct because the apps use system CA.
Pretty disappointed that Apple hasn’t pushed out an emergency patch to address this, though.