Comment by nathanaldensr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nathanaldensr | Hacker News Reader

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There's no need to get aggressive.

It will suck to have to resort to essentially MITM tactics on my developer workstation in order to decrypt local traffic. Yes, there are tools like Fiddler that can do this, but eventually it may be impossible to MITM traffic the way Fiddler does. That will make it more difficult to debug applications. There are also platforms like Pivotal Cloud Foundry that rely on being able to inject headers into HTTP messages as the messages traverse the platform (e.g., to support throttling); this will become more difficult if that traffic has to be encrypted.

HTTP/2 with forced TLS is, in effect, a binary protocol. Right now, developers all over the world enjoy the plain-text and hackable nature of HTTP 1.x.

I'm not sure why it would become impossible to do what Fiddler does. It's not like any major platform is going to stop letting you add root certificates.

I don't agree with the parent post (I think all traffic should be encrypted now that let's encrypt exists) but this is an interesting point.

For example, Google is making it as difficult as possible to install certificate authorities in Android. Root certificates are encrypted as if they are client certificates, requiring the user to set up PIN or password protection on their lock screens. Removing this protection immediately disables the installed user certificates.

Google has changed the Android 7 API so that by default the user certificate store is not used to validate the validity of certificates (only the system store is used). Apps need to opt in to still support user certificates.

Of course this is all done to prevent malicious actors from performing MitM attacks on users. Still, I would not be surprised if Android P removes the user certificate store all together.

Cloud Foundry doesn't have a problem injecting headers, as HTTP traffic is plaintext inside the system itself. It's once it starts traveling across the public internet that encryption is needed. This does make it harder for network edge caches and for middleboxes, but that's not totally a bad thing either.

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