Re:Why TLS 1.3 isn't in browsers yet
by acranox on Wednesday December 27, 2017 @10:35PM
(#16020130)
I think middleboxes also just includes network load balancers. A lot of places do TLS termination at a load balancer and plain HTTP inside the data center. These load balancer appliances are probably where a lot of these issues come up. And they aren’t there to spy on you.
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Load balancers tend to be used on the server-side though, where the servers behind the load balancer serve web API's and such. It's fine if a TLS tunnel terminates at the edge of your private network if what's behind it is aware of this — i.e., the servers within the network serve plain HTTP by design and delegate transport layer security to the load balancer. TLS 1.3 doesn't break this.
These middleboxes are a way to spy on HTTPS connections between browsers and servers (where server can mean the load balancer at the edge of your server cluster), without having to ensure every device on the local network has a set of spyware installed on it.