Open Radar

 
Summary:
A keychain in /System/Library/Keychains/SystemCACertificates.keychain exists on OS X and is used to evaluate certificate trust. Yet, this keychain file is not shown, unlike SystemRoots.keychain, System.keychain and the user's keychains. This keychain item contains 88 Certificate authorities which have implicit system trust and belong to several governmental military, spying and surveillance agencies. This keychain is not displayed in Keychain.app deliberately disguising the existence and that these CAs are considered trusted by OS X by default.

Steps to Reproduce:
Open Keychain Access.app. Examine the list of keychains on the left for an item named SystemCACertificates.

Expected Results:
All keychains that are evaluated for trust should __always__ be presented to the user in Keychain Access.app to give a proper view of the system's trust evaluation and PKI capabilities.

Actual Results:
SystemCACertificates.keychain is deliberately hidden from a user's view.

Regression:
This hidden keychain with surveillance root certificates has been present in OS X since at least 10.6 Snow Leopard if not since Mac OS X 10.0.

Notes:
This behavior severely lowers a user's trust in  OS X since it allows for easy MITM attacks breaking SSL/TLS connection by presenting fraud certificates that still get evaluated as trusted by OS X. This can lead to governmental surveillance, industrial espionage and personal individuals getting harmed due to OS X hiding certificates from the user. This may legally be considered a surveillance backdoor knowingly installed by Apple.