this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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All TLS/HTTPS clients have a set of Certificate Authority keys which they trust. Your client will only accept a public key which is signed by a trusted CA's key. A proper CA will not sign a key for a domain when it has not verified that the entity that wants it's key signed actually controls the domain.
Most browsers trust many certificate authorities from all over the world.
Any of them could...
...and yes, it has happened already.
HTTPS as most of us use it today is useful, but far from foolproof. This is why various additional measures, like certificate pinning, private CAs, and consensus validation are sometimes used.
This is slightly off-topic but I was thinking about it and all of thoes isues can be solved by utilizing blockchain. Imagine a world where instead of CAs, decentralized domain (unstoppable domains, ENS etc.) owners publish their pub keys to the blockchain, the client can than query multiple nodes or store the chainstate locally. When establishing a connection client sends a secret handshake message + clients' pub key encrypted with domains' pub key. To complete the handshake server responds with the same secret message encrypted with clients' pub key.
It seems to me like a MITM hacker can just redirect all requests to a Blockchain node towards their malicious node.