• 0 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle




  • Deep packet inspection by definition requires the ability to see inside the packet, which if using HTTPS wouldn’t be possible for your ISP.

    They can still see the destination IP, return IP, and port number, but that’s it. It would take a ton of storage to log all of that packet data though, and it’d be difficult to come up with a way not to double count it if it’s going through multiple hops on the ISP network.

    Logging DNS requests on the DNS server would be a much easier way of collecting that data if they wanted it. I know cloudflare collects aggregate DNS query data through their public DNS server, and Google likely does too.


  • I’m familiar. Other than key exchange for encrypted connections, the whole point of HTTPS/TLS is establishing who you’re connecting with is who they say they are and preventing man in the middle attacks just like you described.

    If your traffic was being intercepted by something like Zscaler it wouldn’t be able to provide the proper signed certificate of that web address and your browser would throw a mismatch error. IT departments using such intermediaries for https traffic inspection only get around this by installing the intermediaries’ root CA on your system so it’s not flagged by your browser or whatever you’re using for TLS traffic.

    The only way someone could intercept your TLS traffic and then pass it onto you without you knowing is by having that website’s private key to sign the traffic with, which is a major security breach. As soon as something like that is discovered the certificate is revoked and a new one is issued with a different private key.

    So, again, that’s just not how TLS works.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key_infrastructure




  • Oftentimes it’s done because it’s cheaper, though oftentimes it’s actually more expensive but they calculate that money from licenses post initial sale gets them more revenue and margin in the end anyway.

    Still, even if it always was cheaper for the manufacturer this way, the point here is companies should not be able to control something you physically own once you have purchased it. It’s a dangerous precedent to set and things like this will creep into more and more products if we let it.


  • just_browsing@reddthat.comtoTechnology@lemmy.worldFirmware.
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Firmware doesn’t run on an OS, you’re probably thinking of drivers which are different. Drivers are software that tell the OS how to interact with specific hardware.

    Firmware is software that’s baked into specific hardware components and it exists outside of the OS. A visible example most people are familiar with would be the BIOS which is firmware for the motherboard. Hard drives, graphics cards, RAM, etc all also have their own firmware.

    Other devices such as microwaves, washing machines, cars, or anything using microprocessors (so pretty much everything these days) also have components with their own firmware. It is true that device firmware can drive a UI on some devices such a as a microwave, but most people today wouldn’t consider that to be an OS (semantics, I know).