CVE-2017-1000097 in Google
Summary
by MITRE
On Darwin, user's trust preferences for root certificates were not honored. If the user had a root certificate loaded in their Keychain that was explicitly not trusted, a Go program would still verify a connection using that root certificate.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 12/30/2022
This vulnerability exists in the darwin operating system's certificate validation mechanism within go programs, specifically affecting how trust preferences for root certificates are handled. The flaw represents a critical breakdown in the security model where user-defined trust settings are completely ignored during SSL/TLS certificate verification processes. When users explicitly mark a root certificate as untrusted within their keychain preferences, the go runtime continues to accept connections that would otherwise be rejected based on these user-defined security policies.
The technical implementation of this vulnerability stems from how go's crypto/tls package interacts with the darwin keychain trust evaluation system. Rather than respecting the explicit trust decisions made by users through the keychain interface, the go program performs its own certificate validation that bypasses these user preferences. This creates a situation where malicious actors could potentially exploit this behavior to establish trusted connections using certificates that users have intentionally marked as untrusted, effectively circumventing the security controls that users have put in place.
From an operational perspective, this vulnerability significantly undermines the trust model that users expect to have in their certificate management systems. Attackers could potentially install untrusted root certificates in the user's keychain and then use them to establish seemingly legitimate connections that would be accepted by go applications despite the user's explicit trust preferences. This represents a serious escalation of privileges and trust bypass that could lead to man-in-the-middle attacks, data exfiltration, and other malicious activities that would otherwise be prevented by proper certificate trust management.
The vulnerability aligns with CWE-295 which addresses improper certificate validation and CWE-310 which covers cryptographic issues related to trust management. From an ATT&CK framework perspective, this maps to T1552.001 which involves credential access through the use of stolen credentials, and T1071.004 which covers application layer protocol usage. The vulnerability demonstrates a failure in the principle of least privilege and trust management, where user security preferences are not respected by the application layer.
Mitigation strategies should focus on ensuring that go applications properly integrate with the underlying operating system's trust management systems. This includes implementing proper certificate validation that respects user preferences, updating go runtime libraries to properly handle darwin keychain trust decisions, and ensuring that applications perform validation against the complete trust chain rather than bypassing user-defined security policies. Organizations should also consider implementing additional monitoring to detect unusual certificate usage patterns and ensure that certificate trust decisions are properly enforced across all applications.