Whether this behavior presents additional security issues is debatable but I don't think it's something you need to be deeply concerned about - after all, your own antivirus software is doing the man-in-the-middling, not a malicious party. I'm guessing this is what avast! is doing. The solution that many antivirus programs use is to install its own SSL certificate as a root certificate so that it can essentially man-in-the-middle all HTTPS traffic to scan for malware. This presents a risk because if you download a virus, the antivirus software won't know about it until the download is finished and the virus is already saved to your hard drive, allowing criminals to bypass the "live defense" features of AV by simply hosting the malware on an HTTPS site. As useful as it is, HTTPS presents a bit of a problem to antivirus software because when you visit sites over an encrypted connection, your antivirus software cannot see what sites you're visiting or what files you're downloading, at least until the download finishes. The whole goal of HTTPS is to prevent eavesdropping so that anyone monitoring your web traffic can't see what you're sending.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |