Re:On the Timing of iOS’s SSL Vulnerability and Apple’s ‘Add...
by tptacek on Sunday February 23, 2014 @11:51AM
(#7286481)
I don't disagree with any of this. We're now litigating a thought experiment I proposed upthread. In particular: I agree that straight up browser bugs are more common, more exploitable, and more appealing than NSS parsing bugs; I just liked the symmetry of comparing a TLS logic flaw to a different TLS parsing bug in a codebase people weren't as familiar with.
Admittedly, the above leaves aside the elephant in the room - regular old browser bugs, which are vastly more common, more likely to be reliable, and for the aforementioned other adversaries, relatively easily leveraged with exploit kits. As I assume you know, browser sandboxes provide protection against renderer bugs on MitMed or attacker-controlled origins being used to hijack a HTTPS site (and OS-level sandboxes protect non-browser SSL applications), but sandboxes get popped all the time and one of the two targets of this bug, iOS Safari, is single-process, so meh.
I agree the coverage of this bug is overblown (...depressingly, since that's just saying that modern computing is drastically insecure); I strongly doubt it was introduced intentionally, or that the NSA, if it knew about it, was "relying on" it in the sense that the disclosure is a huge loss. But it's still a particularly good bug.