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Comment on One of the Most Alarming Internet Proposals I've Seenparent

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To play devil's advocate, this could potentially be less harmful than the existing situation: where e.g. various corporate nets will require you to install root certs to accomplish the same MITM attack, in a less visible fashion (after installation), with some if not all of the same caveats - especially if given the ability to opt out.

(Bugs, insufficiently scary UI, and "discovery" are all massive concerns of course...)

various corporate nets will require you to install root certs to accomplish the same MITM attack

They don't even bother making you install CA certificates. They just abuse subordinate CAs: see https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2013/02/15/announcing-vers...

I'm also a huge fan of Google's http://www.certificate-transparency.org/, which makes it very difficult to fool very many people for very long.

Hm, no. Various corporate networks doesn't classify as an ISP, the number of potentially abused users is not the same. A company can do whatever it wants to, an ISP offers a service and should respect the privacy of it's costumers, at least theoretically.

This proposal isn't intended for ISPs and should never be used on the public Internet.

Oh, my bad then. I miss-understood the proposal and it's implications. But since the protocol supports that, how can we be sure that ISPs won't use it?

Cynically, "we can't". Or "they already have better options".

Alternatively, outcry and blacklisting ISP proxies - just as we do with root cert abuse.

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