While there is no proof that anyone knew about these weak keys for the year and a half that they were trusted by virtually everybody, and there's no evidence of MITM attacks happening in the wild because of it, you can imagine the payoff that a three letter agency would have if, for even 10 days, there was an opportunity to harvest credentials from important people in high places.
I have no evidence or proof, but I am convinced this wrap/unwrap key generation debacle was intentional and the weak keys were discovered and kept secret by the agencies or governments and used to exploit their adversaries.
You don't need to perform a traditional MITM attack _if you own the airport_ or you _own the free public wifi_. The traffic can be harvested in clear text and we have to come to terms with the _remote possibility_ that this was going on for over a year and a half. If not that long, then certainly for the past 10 days.
This would've been true a while back prior to major browsers checking for certificate transparency log entries as part of the handshake.
So, I do agree this could be problematic, on specific cases where people not using a major browser were accessing resources some is interested on, on a network they have control of. Makes the surface quite small.
The threat here is more so for 'backend' services than regular browser users.
This is misleading. In order to read traffic you would need to swap out the end-entity TLS certs being used. Phones and browsers (at a minimum) enforce certificate transparency, so connections would fail.
But the point of the OP is that git, curl, pip, python, etc don't use certificate transparency. That's why it's so egregious that apple still trusts these certs by default in these non-browser edge cases.
Buddy, 3 letter agencies don't need these weak keys, they straight up own root CAs.
My point is less NSA and more NSO. The UAE was denied a root CA[0]. DarkMatter applied to be its own root CA until it was denied[1] over concerns raised about potential spying/espionage[2].
There are people from these CAs who were denied in the past explicitly for concerns about spying who now work at eMudhra[3,4].
Again, I have no proof. There may never be any proof. But I think it's time we think about who might have found out about this weak key when it was first issued a year and a half ago and trusted by the whole world and what they would have done with that information.