Don't underplay it either though: with a compromised but unrevoked signing cert all it takes is a successful phish, or some problem to allow DNS poisoning (or hack a wireless AP, or …) to direct you to a fake site or (potentially worse as it might be less immediately noticeable and could quietly collect credentials/data for a while) send your automated tools to a malicious API.

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.

It's pretty easy to compromise things like McDonalds or Starbucks WiFi hotspots though, just setup a Pineapple with the right SSIDs and a 5G modem, funnel your target domains through your mitmproxy via the DHCP DNS server you're providing, and that's basically it.

I agree it's not PHP2Shell, but its certainly not being "way overblown" here.

The near-universal use of TLS and the absurd ceremony we go through to ship root CAs everywhere is all premised on the idea that MITMs are not terribly difficult.

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).

You can take your laptop to a busy place, make a "free wifi" hotspot that runs everything through mitmproxy and you can steal everything.

> You have to compromise a lot to be able to make a MITM here.

This is just an argument against TLS in general. Use plain http if you believe this.

php2shell was overblown perhaps but this is being blown quite correctly

The TLS trust chain is the last defense against MITM attacks. The prevalence of MITM attacks is in fact the very reason TLS exists. I'd say it's a lot worse than PHP2Shell because it doesn't only affect poorly maintained servers, but potentially ALL credentials and secrets a user sends over a compromised network with compromised CAs on their device.

The window of opportunity to MITM has passed. If you attempted an MITM from an easy vantage such as telco, ISP, or public wifi you'd be trivially detected as a significant portion of devices are patched, including on these unpatched macs as only the *nix commands are affected and not app bundles.

This is way worse than PHP2Shell in scope of impact and its effects will stick around for much longer. Well, as long as the validity period of the compromised certs anyway

> You have to compromise a lot to be able to make a MITM here.

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50189232

If you hijack the DNS, the laptop can be pwned quite easily. Think of all the coffee shops with unprotected routers out there.

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