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.
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
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?
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that chain to a root CA certificate in this file, these tools don't check Apple's block or whether the certificate has been revoked.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.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.
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.
Pretty much every developer on mac should probably run their patch.
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.
Source: https://mstdn.social/@jschauma/117513596272504904 https://mastodon.social/@glyph/117509558825919922
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
# /usr/bin/curl https://dv-g3b-aaa-noct-emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/
Your client successfully connected to the site. That's bad!
# sudo mv /etc/ssl/cert.pem /tmp/
# sudo ln -s /opt/local/libexec/openssl3/etc/openssl/cert.pem /etc/ssl/cert.pem
# /usr/bin/curl https://dv-g3b-aaa-noct-emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/
curl: (60) SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate
More details here: https://curl.se/docs/sslcerts.htmlOn 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.
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.
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.
Morality doesn't solely depend on action or inaction, it also matter what you act or don't act to.
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!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.
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.
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.
This is just another one of those smells.
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.
"Ten days later, macOS and all applications that rely on it still trust the compromised eMudhra certificates" would have been a better title.