4 ms·

I believe NCSI probes are also purposefully HTTP because captive portals MITM all traffic to force authentication. If it was HTTPS the probe would fail with a c

I believe NCSI probes are also purposefully HTTP because captive portals MITM all traffic to force authentication. If it was HTTPS the probe would fail with a certificate error. The whole point is that the url can be hijacked. This is not really a vulnerability, they have just independently discovered this feature.

AstralStorm 5y ago
The certificate error is of itself diagnostic of a portal rather than a proxy. The reason to use HTTP, is that some portal systems just drop TLS connections until authenticated. (Which is the correct behavior, rather than MITM.) Opening the browser automatically is a big bug, that should be easy to fix.
- jon-wood 5y ago
  It's not a bug, it is quite literally the feature, and something that also happens on Android and iOS, and I believe even on recent releases of Gnome.