This tool checks all applications and preference panes in the typical OS X installation paths whether they contain an outdated MITM-vulnerable version of Sparkle. If that's the case, it checks some further heuristics to try to determine whether the application's updater is actually vulnerable. In the end, it uses this information to classify the risk, where the classifications may take the following values:
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IMMINENT DANGER: the heuristics indicate that it can't be assured, that using the updater won't compromise the system. In the best case, the app publisher provides updated binaries with a patched version of Sparkle, which isn't vulnerable or avoids using unencrypted HTTP connections for retrieving the AppCast, as strongly encouraged by Sparkle's documentation. Alternative countermeasures may range from disabling auto-updates and not using the updater anymore, over restricting the app's network functionalities to putting the app under quarantine.
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UNKNOWN: the app was compiled against an older SDK, so that ATS is not active or there are exclusions from ATS, while the feed URL for the AppCast is not declared in the Info.plist, so it has to be programmatically provided, which can't be determined by statical analysis. Nevertheless the tool inspects all string literals in the executable to find all HTTP URLs, which might include the feed URL. This strategy has limits and can't catch URLs, which weren't fully hardcoded as strings or obfuscated in another way. The found URLs are printed for further investigation through the user to allow a better risk estimation. If an insecure URL serving an AppCast can be found, it is likely that the app is vulnerable, otherwise it can't be excluded.
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BROKEN UPDATER: the app doesn't have exclusions from ATS while the feed URL is insecure and it was compiled against OS X 10.11 SDK, which causes that ATS is enabled and insecure HTTP requests are blocked by default. That means the updater won't be able to download any updates.
curl -sSLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mrackwitz/Jeroboam/master/jeroboam
less jeroboam
ruby jeroboam
While you could theoretically just pipe the raw contents of the executable into your Ruby interpreter as seen below, this is not a fail-proof concept. So the recommended way would be as seen above: download the script and run it not before you made sure yourself that everything is alright.
> curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mrackwitz/jeroboam/master/jeroboam | ruby
Copyright (c) 2016 Marius Rackwitz
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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