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Comment by eugenekolo | Hacker News Reader

There's no point in implementing cert pinning if you don't also have integrity checking... Being able to alter bytes in the physical file and running it should not be possible (without another bypass).

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Cert pinning protects against compromised certificate authorities. There are hundreds of trusted root certificates in most operating system stores so one of them gets breached every once and a while.

Integrity checking is user-hostile, but certificate pinning can be good for users.

I don't know which users integrity checking the executable would be hostile against. But, I see your point that perhaps their reason for cert pinning is to defend against compromised CAs. It does fit the narrative better with their lack of obfuscation and other layers of defense on their app.

Stopping users from modifying the software they run is user hostile.

Eh, clearly it raises the barrier to entry significantly. You’re never safe from a truly determined adversary, but you can keep out the riff raff.

Perhaps I'm a bit harsh... but my suggestion to fortune 500 tech company remains. Implement integrity validation as well, otherwise all it takes is editing 2 bytes to bypass your ssl pinning.

Right, but the threat model of SSL pinning is an attacker that has compromised the CA certificate store. The user editing a binary on disk is not a security problem.

Cool idea! Now it takes 2 bytes to bypass integrity validation, and 2 bytes to bypass cert pinning. (4 bytes in total)

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