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The standards bodies don’t seem to buy the “bad things” argument and appear resolute on making it harder to MITM traffic on the wire and attempting to force IDS/IPS to all be run on the client.

Is there a 5-10 year future where you just can’t do this as a middlebox?



Protocols supported MITM with correct configurations and it led to complete ossification of said protocols because middleboxes suck at following standards.

It seems that at the time these features were dropped, most middleboxes have ignored features like exporting keys or configuring static RSA keys and went for CA-MitM attacks instead. You should expect these tools to break if they're actively trying to subvert protocols to do things they're not designed to support.

I don't really see what changed, though. I guess static keys were dropped to provide forward secrecy, but other than that running your own rogue CA is as possible as it was 20 years ago. Middleboxes lagging behind in support for features like HTTP/3 is probably annoying, but that's because of a lack of implementation more than anything.

You can still use your domain tools/MDM configuration/settings to configure an HTTPS proxy and firewall off the normal ports if you want to MitM your network reliably. If yiur prozy doesnt support http/3, it will happily downgrade your connection to HTTP/1.1 for you. Android's insistence on not actually applying user-installed certificates is a pain for many apps, but other operating systems will happily and silently drop security measures like certificate transparency when they encounter a user-operated MitM CA.

The lack of MitMability comes down to Android being fussy, IoT devices you had no chance of ever controlling needing workarounds, and devices you don't have permissions to manage not being manageable. I really do wish Android would let MDM solutions inject certificates into the system store (though I can see why they don't with the wide range of stalkerware in the wild).


Second paragraph: "most middleboxes ..."

It is the "others".




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