How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic?

Re:How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted m... by walrus01 on Saturday July 27, 2024 @10:15PM (#41090784)

That's a very good point. I have within recent memory installed my own internal CA that I run on Android devices that I own and trust, and the process on android 11+ is sufficiently daunting that 99.5% of peoples' moms could not do it in one or two clicks. You have to go deep into system settings and manually import the CA. This requires first file-transferring the CA file somewhere onto local /sdcard storage and possibly having a file system explorer app installed to be able to view its location on "disk" and pick it.

As is pointed out in the article, I would presume that Google saw the threat from allowing an app to install and trust a root CA as well, and removed the ability for a "one click" install of a root CA:

"KeyChain.createInstallIntent() stopped working in Android 7 (Nougat). A user would have to manually install the certificate. It would no longer be possible to have Facebook's CA cert installed directly in the app."

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Re:How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted m... by sadboi31 on Monday July 29, 2024 @09:48AM (#41100418)

I would argue that everyone over the age of 8 can do it with sufficient motivation and quality documentation. $10-20 and the promise of more money doing some low-effort "consumer survey" or providing "extra analytics" is pretty enticing to a massive number of people really struggling in this country.

Despite being hard-up I don't think the vast majority of these low-income individuals would agree to being so egregiously wiretapped and data mined for future political ads on youtube or bundled into some other product without better compensation.

[ Parent | on HN ]