Anti-virus vendors are intercepting and analyzing your HTTPS traffic
Parties like Google, Mozilla, Cloudflare, and researchers from two Universities are criticising interception of HTTPS traffic by antivirus software. By installing an own root certificate on the user’s computer the antivirus applications have found a way to be able to analyze the content of encrypted internet connections.
The method is frequently used by antivirus vendors reports myce.com today. The way the software intercepts HTTPS traffic decreases the security of it. The virus scanners can introduce all kinds of new vulnerabilities, according to a report released by the researchers and companies:
For the report, the researchers analyzed 8 billion secured connections to the Firefox update servers, to several popular e-commerce websites and to Cloudflare’s content distribution network. About 4% of the connections to the Firefox servers was intercepted, 6.2% of the e-commerce websites and 10.9% of the connections to Cloudflare was intercepted.
The researchers also analyzed the security impact of the intercepted connections. About 97% of Firefox, 32% of e-commerce, and 54% of Cloudflare connections that were intercepted became less
secure.
“Alarmingly, not only did intercepted connections use weaker cryptographic algorithms, but 10–40% advertised support for known-broken ciphers that would allow an active man-in-the-middle attacker to later intercept, downgrade, and decrypt the connection,” according to the researchers.
While it was already known that security software intercepted HTTPS traffic, the researchers were still surprised, “while the security community has long known that security products intercept connections, we have largely ignored the issue, believing that only a small fraction of connections are affected. However, we find that interception has become startlingly widespread and with worrying consequences.”
Thy hope that security vendors will start using alternatives to HTTPS interception as, “interception products drastically reduce connection security.”
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Senior Member
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I have feeling antiviruses becoming obsolete. Antivirus doesn't defend you, they scare you, collect your data, break your programs and back to scaring. All for greater profit.
Customers just happy to have antivirus as a morale support.
Unfortunately, antivirus also doesn't cure stupidity. Customer can't just be stupid and rely on antivirus to cover up while it do all stupid things on PC.
21th century is about not being stupid online. Sharing USBs and CDs with your friends as we did in 20th century is not very common anymore. So there less and less work for antivirus to actually cover.
Senior Member
Posts: 19503
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Mozilla really want you to uninstall your AV lately, makes me suspicious of Mozilla not my AV
Senior Member
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That's it? Despite the sample size that seems pretty low. The degradation of security stuff is higher within those stats but still. Why is it so low? Upto 89.1% connections didn't use third party security software?
That was one ex-Mozzarella.
Senior Member
Posts: 19503
Joined: 2010-04-21
That was one ex-Mozzarella.
I'm suspicious of all pizzerias advising the removal of security software too
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Joined: 2011-10-22
The plot thickens.