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A comment on Man jailed for over 5 years and fined $76K for selling VPN in southern China. Parent comment

Re:Man jailed for over 5 years and fined $76K for selling VP... by turblety on Friday December 22, 2017 @01:12AM (#15985604)
The problem with root certificates is there are so many of them installed by default with your operating system.

As of writing this message I currently have over 170 root certificates on my macOS. Some of them are from companies who are known to care very little about your privacy. There's even a "Federal Common Policy" certificate which is actually run by the US government [1]

If the government did MITM you're traffic, it would still show in the certificate chain. But how many people really check this every time they visit a site?

1. https://security.stackexchange.com/a/71174

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Man jailed for over 5 years and fined $76K for selling VP... by willstrafach on Friday December 22, 2017 @09:58AM (#15987840)
1. It is a calculated risk to MitM this way, if someone notices the cert is different than what everyone else sees, there would be pretty major blowback.

2. Regardless, Certificate Transparency means it will almost certainly be noticed.

[ Parent | on HN ]