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This is always the problem with firewalls. If your adversary controls both ends of the connection then it's not outbound HTTPS traffic you're letting through. I
by Silhouette 2y ago
This is always the problem with firewalls. If your adversary controls both ends of the connection then it's not outbound HTTPS traffic you're letting through. It's totally arbitrary two-way traffic that happens to be transmitted over a connection first established to port 443 on the remote host.
The only useful technical defence against this kind of deception today is deep packet inspection and a policy of blocking everything by default and only permitting through packets you can actively approve. But that becomes very expensive very quickly and there are practical limits on how far you can go. Ultimately if your adversary is willing to engage covertly in the kind of hacks mentioned in the article then they're probably also willing to engage in steganography to get past whatever DPI rules you can afford to run. Then you're back to square one and either you trust their device or you sandbox it.
In reality a more effective defence is probably the one involving contracts with severe penalties for this kind of behaviour and liability for any consequential losses.