Stop Breaking TLS
2 days ago
- #Privacy
- #Security
- #TLS
- TLS 'Inspection' software undermines the security guarantees of TLS by acting as a Man In The Middle (MITM), similar to the attack vectors TLS was designed to prevent.
- It compromises privacy by allowing organizations to intercept and monitor all encrypted traffic, including sensitive information like medical records and banking sessions.
- The practice increases security risks by making the MITM private key a single point of failure, which is more likely to be compromised than all certificate authorities simultaneously.
- Implementing TLS inspection is administratively burdensome due to varying certificate formats, installation methods, and the complexity of modern cloud-native applications.
- It normalizes bad security practices by making technical staff ignore TLS errors, leading to routine disabling of certificate verification.
- TLS inspection introduces performance and availability issues, as all traffic must be decrypted and re-encrypted, potentially creating bottlenecks and single points of failure.
- Alternative security measures like anomaly detection, Zero Trust architecture, and AI-driven analysis are less invasive and more effective for modern infrastructure.