A number of folks noticed that certain older applications they use on macOS stopped working as of August 24th, 2021. As of this date, this appears to affect the following applications among others:
Note: This list is not complete, it’s just the ones I’m aware of as of August 24, 2021.
Why this is happening goes back to an episode in 2018, where Symantec had to get out of the PKI certificate issuing business because of a number of issues discovered with how Symantec had been issuing certificates.
As part of these issues, Apple issued an advisory that a number of Symantec Certificate Authority (CA) root certificates were to be distrusted by Apple on a timeline which concluded with the full distrust of Symantec CAs on February 25, 2020.
While this primarily affected website operators, Symantec also issued certificates from the affected Symantec CAs which were used to provide code signing for applications. An example of this is RSA SecurID Software Token 4.2.1.
Update 8-26-2021: RSA has released RSA SecurID Software Token 4.2.2 to resolve the issue with RSA SecurID Software Token 4.2.1. For more details, please see the link below:
In the case of SecureID, this app relies on Qt Core for user interface support and ships copies of the QT Core framework along with the SecureID app. SecurID stores this in the following location:
/Library/Frameworks/stauto32.framework
If you take a look at the installer, you can see where the files are supposed to go.
However, the actual file which is causing the issue is buried further down in the following location:
/Library/Frameworks/stauto32.framework/Versions/4/QtCore.cire
This file is important because the QT Core framework is shipped without Apple’s code signing, which is to say that QT is not using an Apple Developer ID signing certificate to sign QT Core. Instead, QT ships a code signing certificate chain and that information is stored in the QtCore.cire file.
One of the certificates in the code signing certificate chain is using VeriSign Class 3 Public Primary Certification Authority – G5 as its root certificate authority (root CA). That root CA is one of the Symantec CAs which is no longer trusted by Apple.
To summarize: the SecureID app has a component which is signed by a not-trusted certificate. This is causing SecureID to not trust that component, which then prevents the app from launching correctly.
Why is this happening now?
Apple released updates on August 23, 2021 for both XProtect (now version 2150) and Malware Removal Tool (now version 1.82). My assumption is that XProtect’s update included instructions to no longer accept code signing from the distrusted Symantec CAs. XProtect checks executable code on launch, so it would be working with Gatekeeper to detect and block the no-longer-trusted code signing.
What should you do?
See if your vendor has released an updated version of the app which is having problems. If they haven’t yet, I recommend contacting them to make sure they’re aware of the problem.
Hat tip to all the folks working on this issue in the MacAdmins Slack for helping diagnose the issue and why it is happening.