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Looks like they weren't checking the hostname in the certificate. This would allow anyone with a certificate signed by a trusted CA to do a MITM attack on iOS devices. Very very bad vulnerability.


It seems to be a bit more than that, as I've verified that iOS 7.0.4 and Mac OS X 10.9.1 both refuse to connect to a server with a certificate for a different hostname. Sounds like verification is somehow different when connecting to a raw IP address. Safari treats that case differently, anyway: if I try to connect to a hostname that's different from what the certificate says, it simply refuses to establish the connection at all. If I try to connect to the raw IP address, it says the certificate is wrong, but gives me the choice to ignore the error and proceed anyway. Odd stuff.


Looking at the code, this bug probably doesn't happen on connections which use TLS 1.2, which any properly configured server should support these days. (There's a seperate codepath for TLS 1.2 connections.) Note that this doesn't provide any protection against an attacker exploiting the vulnerability, since they get to choose what TLS version is used.


Maybe due to lots of appliances that run HTTPS with a self-signed cert to "productname", but are often accessed via an IP?




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