alt Hacker News> It's fortunate that the steps required here aren't particularly complicated for the devices you can update, and the advice essentially boils down to 'update them'. The problem is the devices you can't update or update easily.
> Update everything that ships a CA bundle: your OS ca-certificates package, certifi, Node, Homebrew, and rebuild your container images once the base images pick up the change.
> Devices you can't update are the hard part. Routers, printers, TVs, appliances with frozen firmware will trust these certificates until expiry, which is July 2039...
Quick -- we need to MITM all the smart TVs so they can be jailbroken in one fell swoop!
Replies
These devices are already very weak and many of them even do non-TLS updates with no signing check anyway.
If it has been so weak already, it can't be weaker.
It's easy enough to apt upgrade, and curl shows it's not vulnerable.
But what about python pip and node and bun which bundle their own certs?
And then you'll have a compiled binary like Claude Code, which was built with bun, and has its vulnerable certificates bundled in, ignoring the system certs.
If you just take them offline you can do this without having to rush.
Just change your WiFi password, don’t give them the new one and don’t update them lol.
Just imagine how much stuff you're going to be able to MiTM now!!
Some of them seem to do some cert pinning
> > Devices you can't update are the hard part. Routers, printers, TVs, appliances with frozen firmware will trust these certificates until expiry, which is July 2039...
The interesting question is, how many of these devices will have the compromised CA root certificate in place?
Oh and another thing is problematic, many a Java app ships with its own keystore.jks if it needs to trust some privately hosted endpoint, and that keystore.jks may or may not contain the compromised CA root certificate... updating the OS will not catch this kind of stuff.
[dead]
Devices that are smart enough to talk to the internet but not smart enough to let the user install their own certs should not exist.