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Comment by cbr | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, no:

    Chrome does not perform pin validation when the
    certificate chain chains up to a private trust anchor.
    A key result of this policy is that private trust
    anchors can be used to proxy (or MITM) connections,
    even to pinned sites.

-- https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/security-faq...

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How does "Chrome does not perform pin validation" translate to "This is not what pinning defends against"?

The fact that Chrome ships with a broken implementation does not imply the concept is broken.

You are right of course, but there are apparently a whole lot of people of the opinion that since Chrome was (one of the?) first apps implementing some sort of pinning, that this is de facto what certificate pinning "is".

I don't really agree with that, but it's IMO more useful to acknowledge the confusion, than having an argument about whether Chrome really does pinning or even gets to de facto define pinning or not, since this isn't even about Chrome :)

I get your point. The notion of designating a broken implementation as "the standard" makes me queasy, ever since IE6 happened.

But still, I would have much preferred if the GP would have started their comment with "yes, but" instead of "sorry, no". That would have made the distinction much clearer.

How would the telco get their Private Trust Anchor into the certificate store ? More social engineering, i suppose. At the app level though, a chain resolution like what you describe is not required.

I'll give you a hint: they run customs.

Wuh? Why not just ask the user to insert the cert?

They COULD do that but they almost certainly aren't doing that. That's a tedious task that requires a lot of time and technically competent employees.

Also we are talking about apps implementing certificate pinning. Not reading from the OS store etc., and therefore, I don't see Kazakhstan reverse engineering and patching executables.

They will be telling citizens to install a "national security certificate". After they implement this, you won't be able to access the internet without it.

Why the hell doesn't Chrome have its own root cert store by now anyway? I can't believe they are leaving such an important trust piece to Microsoft's Windows...

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