About the compromised eMudhra intermediate CAs
support.apple.com
support.apple.com
What a clusterfuck
they solved the issue for the people they care about
Also, if they truly didn't care about Terminal users, they would not have even published this article!!
A lot do it because sometimes there is no convenient library wrapping what they are trying to check or execute that they are aware of, and running a cli command is generally cheap unless you are doing it in a tight loop. A lot of the time this is “it'll do until I find the right library or bindings” code that should have been fixed before release, but it isn't all as bad as running top as you describe.
I agree, you're on a *nix OS, calling a CLI tool should be a perfectly valid way to do something.
IMO the real issue is that Apple's built-in CLI tools aren't properly integrated with the rest of the system. Apple's curl used to use the same certificate store as the rest of the OS, then Apple changed it.
It was technically curl that dropped SecureTransport but I guess because no one at Apple was willing to maintain it and it apparently is a frozen API that doesn't support newer than TLS 1.2 (!). For a while their inbuilt curl could use both but preferred LibreSSL anyway.
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/01/14/secure-transport-supp...
Well yeah, so not really curl's fault here.
More importantly, IIRC Apple's curl actually stopped using SecureTransport before upstream dropped it.
Most notably agents like Claude Code and Codex? Easy to check if you ask it to run:
$ curl 'https://dv-g3b-emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/'
Your client successfully connected to the site. That's bad!See the lists in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449; I believe that "dv-g3b-" corresponds to the intermediate CA certificate listed as "EM DV TLS CA - G3B"
DV/OV/EV are "Domain Validated", "Organization Validated" and "Extended Validation" which refer to different levels of checking that the CA should done before issuing a certificate with a particular name in it.
Huh, I tried to do this a long time ago and permissions bit me and I quit. I was making a nice UI that would run ffmpeg to stitch together some video files, so it would use native UI elements to pick the input files and output location, then generate the ffmpeg command and run it. It worked fine on my machine but it ran into permissions on my friend's machine who needed it and I gave up because they found something better.
ofc it does matter what they do in there, but would users really need to figure all that out themselves and strace all the things to see whats going on down there? :')
truly poor response. happy i dont use apple.
such an expensive flytrap
How often are people “git clone”ing a repo without browsing to the GitHub site first? Safari would throw up certificate errors. And also, TLS on Git doesn’t even authenticate the code you’re downloading is legitimate at all. It could be modified by the Git host or a supply chain attack, etc.
Yea, it’s not great. Ideally the risk is reduced to zero from patching. But a lot of the times we accept some level of cybersecurity risk out of practicality. This is why we have responsible disclosure windows lasting months. It takes a while to do proper release engineering and testing for something like a whole OS update.
One of the certificates literally has a private key of 4; it's as compromised as it could quite possibly be. This is not a "one of the intermediates have a weak and possibly crackable key" or "a bunch of incorrect certs were issued but the issuance was patched".
To a MITM attacker, git clones can be easily distinguished from visiting in Safari. You could choose to only poison git clones; without poisoning anything else.
Heck, you can probably build an exploit kit in a hour; camp out around a Starbucks or McDonalds with open wifi, and start compromising git clones and deliver malicious payloads.
To know whether a request is a git client or web browser, an attacker needs to be able to inspect the contents of the web request (to check the user agent or whatever). If the site is using a legitimate certificate, the attacker has no way to inspect the contents because it is encrypted with a key they do not control.
If an attacker used their own, eMudhra-signed certificate, it would throw the certificate error in Safari.
The whole point of TLS and certificates is to counter network MITM attacks.
Browsers and clients emit a lot of fingerprints, you can probably figure it out loosely from the TLS initialisation.
1) An attacker is MITMing your connection. This is already not easily exploitable by most threat actors short of being on a public Wi-Fi network, otherwise you are likely at the nation-state level attacker at this point.
2) An attacker knows exactly which Git repo you’re about to clone and has prepared a malicious version (noting they can’t snoop on your encrypted web traffic).
3) An attacker has developed a way to differentiate between Git over HTTPS and Safari, by using a side channel “fingerprinting” method that works with your exact versions of git and macOS.
4) You don’t pin the git clone to a particular hash or signature.
This is already a very low level of exploitability. All of these things need to be satisfied for the attack you’re describing to work.
Now let’s look at a more practical attack that exists regardless of if you have the patch from Apple.
1) A maintainer of an open source project you use has their GitHub account compromised due to credential stuffing and commits a malicious version.
2) You don’t pin the git clone to a particular hash or signature.
This attack is significantly more exploitable and has happened over and over again in supply chain attacks.
But look at the commonality: in both, no certificate pinning or signature checking was done. If you follow best practices, this stops both attacks dead cold.
This is the security engineering. It’s not just checking boxes. It’s evaluating risks.
This is absolutely not security engineering. This is nit picking a specific attack factor and trying to argue that it’s impractical. I suspect you are wrong, but it doesn’t matter, because you are ignoring the broader class of attacks and focusing on one specific example. The class issue is that on a Mac, you cannot trust any terminal-based application to honor the CRL. This means that any site accessed from a terminal based application cannot be trusted. There are a billion ways to exploit that.
This is not good security engineering from Apple. There is no way to justify this. Humans make mistakes, and that’s just life, but we shouldn’t pretend that this is an acceptable state or an acceptable response.
1) Why wouldn't you have a SSOT for certs and instead rely on patching different apps individually?
2) Doesn't this violate defense in depth? Exploits for a widely disclosed issue now have turnaround activation within hours, not weeks. Not patching all surface areas and actively disclosing as such seems very much like drawing up a map for a jailbroken LLM to gin up a rudimentary attack.
3) Also doesn't this violate the principle of secure by default especially for power users who are more likely to be the ones with higher privileges across distributed systems?
2) Yes, but actually, this is exactly why we have defense in depth. This is a temporary measure while a permanent patch is coming. Defense in depth means a single hole does not result in compromise. I would argue that this situation with Apple demonstrates defense in depth actually working as intended. If this was the permanent solution, and no further patch was coming from Apple, then yes, it would violate defense in depth.
3) Related to above, yes. But it’s not permanent.
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Se...
Browsers came along and they wanted to maintain their own cert store because operating system flat files were often out of date.
Operating systems grew their own stores because they wanted some kind of registry that was more integrated with the rest of their ecosystem.
Nobody coordinated. CLI tools and unix libraries don't care about browsers or O/S registries, operating systems have requirements so that they can't use the flat files, everyone screams about stuff like systemd turning unix into windows.
And it will continue to proliferate. System management tools often ship their own certs since the O/S certs can be out of date and untrustworthy and may not be able to talk to AWS before you bootstrap the management tool and update the system certs because people still run ancient shit like RHEL5. This is more or less the same reason browsers ship their own as well. I've made the decision to ship an embedded cert store in a product before, and nothing has fundamentally changed that would cause me to rethink that decision (even though for people who have an up-to-date O/S it is strictly additional cost that they now have to track a cert store in another product--but you have to build for the lowest common denominator).
People are going to be running pull or push much more than clone, and will often be running those without opening the origin on Safari.
What’s the point of this question? Would going to GitHub.com in my browser somehow protect me from a MITM attack here?
These may not be the same people but sometimes they are
I have an apple device and I like its hardware at its price. My brother gifted it to me and my father had an accident with it once which caused it to fall on pure concrete. Other laptops would have been broken but for this it was a tis but a scratch moment
But I am an openness zealot by heart. I can mix and match
In this particular instance though. Shame on apple for not taking any steps and maybe actively fighting against it. I don’t understand why! I hope that they definitely do something about it
Please, Apple, break the process on getting a fix out for this. I want to stop doing a morning check in with my team about certs.
They can follow the 4 steps (3 was not optional for me) to remediate.
No, this is just laziness or stupidity on apples part.
People were just losing their minds on here over bugs in the 27.2 beta release that hasn't even shipped yet, with wild conspiracy theories about what Apple was doing.
So you wind up with a typical megacorp release process where nothing can happen if it isn't signed off in triplicate and two operators crack open the books with the missile codes and turn the keys at the same time to launch the update.
The result is that shipping a single file for a critical security update takes way too long.
- set variable s to that string: -v s='=== /C=IN/OU=emSign PKI/O=eMudhra Technologies Limited/CN=emSign ECC Root CA - G3'
- on lines matching the regex between //, set skip to false: /^(===|###) /{skip=0}
- on lines matching s, set skip to true: $0==s{skip=1}
- if skip is false, print the line: !skip
And on the subject of the useless use of cat, I like the form because it makes input a normal command(replaceable by any other command), rather than a shell special form. I sort of wish that "tee" would not default to emitting on stdout to better act as cat's compliment.
Come on Apple, do better.
https://gist.github.com/hbmartin/d485b07691d9dc2a66937f50719...
Don't have a stranger here summarize/concatenate them for you
I don't blame Apple for overlooking it when they have their own security stack that all their own apps use, which already responded to the incident within two hours of the revocation. As another commenter pointed out, Terminal commands probably just weren't a priority of their threat model. I do hope they fix that, but mentioning their market cap is not gonna help here.
Meanwhile, it's unsafe to run `git clone` on macOS unless you manually edit some files, and then edit them again after a macOS update puts the dangerous root certificates back.
In what world has Apple been the most "thorough"?
Apple security updates, especially automatic ones, likely don't have the capability to simply write to arbitrary files on the system or run arbitrary commands at install time. Of all vendors, certainly from Apple I'd expect this.
Most likely, other vendors either already used a similar store as the root of trust system-wide (didn't have their own separate security stacks), or their security updates do have the ability to write anywhere or do anything.
And of course, Linux distros and other platforms where the component can be updated separately from the operating system have an even easier time.
This is not Apple intentionally leaving terminal users high and dry. The article literally is the proof otherwise while they no-doubt work on a better solution.
> I'm sorry, but how is revoking a bad cert not supported in an easy way? Along with adding a cert and using it to establish a secure connection, that seems to be the core features of a cert store?
> Yet somehow, you manage to come to the conclusion that the vendor requiring manual work is the most thorough? I mean, in documenting their failure, maybe.
> With all their talk of caring about user privacy, this seems incompetent at best.
To be fair other vendors almost universally don't document their failures at all or provide any remediation steps to users whatsoever. I always enjoy the exceptions to this rule, but it's not the norm whatsoever.
You seem to be ignoring that Apple's security framework responded to the incident within about 2 hours in most cases. Safari and other macOS apps were protected right off the bat.
It's only this legacy BSD store that needs an OS update, almost certainly because they simply didn't already have a process in place to update it out-of-band. Because they're vertically integrated, they probably don't have an arbitrary do-anything feature that can paper over the lack of foresight here, like other vendors might.
I'd honestly consider that a feature, but sure, the benefits would outweigh the risks in this one particular case.
Looking forward to a comment that is much more grounded than substantial than this.
> can still accept these certificates until a future software update
This suggests they don't have the capability to patch it with Rapid Security Responses / Background Security Improvements, given that they haven't.
Sure, I speculate that they likely would have already if they could have. Sure, I speculate that if they couldn't have, they might add the capability for the future. Sure, I speculate about why they wouldn't have already had a process for this. Whatever whatever. Disregard all that if you want, but the fact remains in the article.
Why would I judge Apple only on the quality of this docs page (which is good) but not on their poor work that resulted in this situation in the first place?
Most (if not all) of the popular BSDs managed to ship the update ages ago. I would expect a trillion dollar company like Apple to have better and more thoughtful engineering than random volunteer projects.
Sure. It's not their fault for failing now to use a capability that doesn't exist, though. I feel like the difference is lost on some people, but they're already in this situation.
* apple told admins how to fix the vulnerability * apple shipped update 27.2, with no fix (today) * the update reverted the admin fix quietly
It's right there in the article, look how proactive they're being!
Why would it support this file? Are CA trust stores really that important? /s
> and no other vendor has been nearly as thorough about this
1. That's totally not true. Apple has messed up something that is trivial to fix. 2. The EU's CRA is going to crush them if they don't get their shit together.
Would it have been better if the next operating system update already shipped a fixed store rather than another broken one? Sure. Would it have been even better if they had the ability to remotely fix the store on the many millions of already online Apple devices? Absolutely. But if they couldn't do either of those things, which seems likely at this point, this is the next best thing while they get the rest of their shit in order.
I don't think it's particularly constructive to point out how everybody else has already been able to patch this in all places. Apple's clearly in a spot right now. Blame them for that, but don't blame them for picking the best option at their disposal right now.