Comment by paimapi
3 hours ago
Some questions from a netsec novice:
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?
Historically, stuff like openssl and cli command tools used flat files like /etc/ssl/certs.pem.
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 System management tools often ship their own certs since the O/S certs can be out of date and untrustworthy and may not be able to talk to AWS before you bootstrap the management tool and update the system certs because people still run ancient shit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).
1) I would argue that different trust stores are a carryover macOS’s Unix heritage. Having multiple roots of trust is actually very common. For instance Firefox maintains their own root of trust from the system, it’s called NSS. Different programming languages like Java and Rust also often use different roots. It’s not amazing, and has holes, but a lot of it comes down to historical reasons and a certain level of risk acceptance.
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.