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Just yesterday I had posted a similar thread where an AV was MITMing traffic between the browser https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13307096 https://news.ycom
by winteriscoming 10y ago
Just yesterday I had posted a similar thread where an AV was MITMing traffic between the browser https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13307096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13307096. I'm still curious why this practice is allowed and these CAs are still trusted by browsers and such.
- fencepost 10y agoBecause the AV is doing it to check for malicious content being downloaded via a secure connection - content that may be exploiting security holes that have not been patched yet, or which have been patched but the user hasn't updated. It's not at all uncommon for me to be asked to look at a PC and find it has an old version of Firefox and the only user is running as a non-admin, or even more commonly to find all those nice little buttons in the system tray advising about updates to Adobe Reader, Java, and maybe a few drivers. Many things that would take advantage of those would need to be written to disk and the AV could presumably catch them then, but how about JavaScript exploits? And how does the browser respond to writing things to disk (presumably having exclusive write access) then losing access to them? There's a juggling act going on there, and I suspect it's a lot easier for an AV vendor to capture and review the network traffic as a single point of contact rather than trying to work with multiple browser and other software vendors to make sure that their software interoperates correctly with the AV.