Comment by ratorx
5 hours ago
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.
PKI works on trust. When a CA does things that violate that trust, their root gets removed. That's how it's supposed to work.
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.
It's relatively new I think.
> Removing the root CA will mean that these valid certificates no longer work.
Great, that’s fine. They can reissue.
I'm no expert in the matter, but weren't only the intermediate CAs compromised, not the root?
Yep, but the certs.pem file only contains the root and does not know anything about intermediates.
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.
I think it’s possible to add intermediate certificates with distrust marker attributes to bundles with OpenSSL. But other libraries consuming the bundle would not understand it, so the problem remains.