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A comment on Edgedressing. Parent comment

Re:Edgedressing by lmz on Monday July 19, 2021 @01:18AM (#27879521)
Yup. I thought this (captive portal detection) was common knowledge? Android also does this.
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Re:Edgedressing by CaveTech on Monday July 19, 2021 @02:00AM (#27879688)
I believe NCSI probes are also purposefully HTTP because captive portals MITM all traffic to force authentication. If it was HTTPS the probe would fail with a certificate error. The whole point is that the url can be hijacked. This is not really a vulnerability, they have just independently discovered this feature.
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Re:Edgedressing by AstralStorm on Monday July 19, 2021 @02:59AM (#27879966)
The certificate error is of itself diagnostic of a portal rather than a proxy. The reason to use HTTP, is that some portal systems just drop TLS connections until authenticated. (Which is the correct behavior, rather than MITM.)

Opening the browser automatically is a big bug, that should be easy to fix.

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Re:Edgedressing by jon-wood on Monday July 19, 2021 @08:10AM (#27881714)
It's not a bug, it is quite literally the feature, and something that also happens on Android and iOS, and I believe even on recent releases of Gnome.
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