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 lots of embedded devices 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).
Either way, I mean rouge in the sense of an AP that uses the same SSID and password as the AP of a coffee shop or office to have devices automatically connect to it without their users noticing.
“Rogue” is a completely different word. Rogue access point.
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.
I’d also bet more things use libcurl behind the scenes than we appreciate, and that at least a few of them have things like silent updates which retry after a failure without notifying a user. I’ve seen a lot of agents which just try to periodically check in because they’re designed not to be noisy on lousy networks.
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.
I don’t think that’s either targeted or unlikely?
I just set up my phone's hotspot to be the same SSID and password as the network the robots already know from the office, and I'll have the robots, a couple phones, and a laptop connected in 10 seconds.
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.