Codesigning, untrusted certificate authorities and why certain apps aren’t launching | Der Flounder
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:
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.
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:
