Submission + - Apple Fixes Critical Certificate Validation Bug in iOS 7.06
Trailrunner7 writes: Apple on Friday quietly pushed out a security update to iOS that restores some certificate-validation checks that had apparently been missing from the operating system for an unspecified amount of time.
“Secure Transport failed to validate the authenticity of the connection. This issue was addressed by restoring missing validation steps,” the Apple advisory says.
The wording of the description is interesting, as it suggests that the proper certificate-validation checks were in place at some point in iOS but were later removed somehow. The effect of an exploit against this vulnerability would be for an attacker with a man-in-the-middle position on the victim’s network would be able to read supposedly secure communications. It’s not clear when the vulnerability was introduced, but the CVE entry for the bug was reserved on Jan. 8.
“Secure Transport failed to validate the authenticity of the connection. This issue was addressed by restoring missing validation steps,” the Apple advisory says.
The wording of the description is interesting, as it suggests that the proper certificate-validation checks were in place at some point in iOS but were later removed somehow. The effect of an exploit against this vulnerability would be for an attacker with a man-in-the-middle position on the victim’s network would be able to read supposedly secure communications. It’s not clear when the vulnerability was introduced, but the CVE entry for the bug was reserved on Jan. 8.
