They put that requirement in there because HSTS is pointless without it. The website is literally saying "we will always (w/ expiration) have valid TLS, if we don't that's a problem". Allowing users to bypass it allows criminals to go "oh we're having problems with the cert, just type 'badidea' and click yes to continue to be hacked".
And if that makes it pointless, then just remove it entirely. Believe it or not, I've never seen a cert error in the wild that wasn't an expiration of a valid cert or a misconfiguration.
The boogeyman of MITM attacks which PKI certs protect from is used to justify a lot of terrible changes to the web that aren't reflected by reality: In most cases they're just going to hack the real server and serve malicious content from your valid certificate anyways. Or they'll trick someone into giving their credentials to bonkofamerica.com because people are easy to fool. Why MITM Amazon when people will happily treat an order email sent from a Gmail account as legitimate?
I have. Usually caused by a captive portal.
> The boogeyman of MITM attacks which PKI certs protect from is used to justify a lot of terrible changes to the web that aren't reflected by reality.
The move to use HTTPS everywhere was started in response to packet sniffing tools like Firesheep. That’s not a boogeyman; it’s a proof of concept that works in realistic scenarios.
> Why MITM Amazon when people will happily treat an order email sent from a Gmail account as legitimate?
So what? How about solving both problems?
I never seen a captive portal using a valid certificate either. Not like I saw many captive portals (last time was like... 2018?) but still.
And invalidate every user's session whenever the server's certificate is renewed??
What's the definition of a fake certificate? Self signed? Signed by a real CA, but for a different domain (the captive portal operator's generally)?
Here's one example:
https://www.engadget.com/2018-04-25-hackers-dns-phishing-sca...
Are you using this as an example of how HSTS is helping users now? Because Chrome allows you to type 'thisisunsafe' and you'll get through the warning, regardless of HSTS.
No. If I click an http:// link, I want that link to be upgraded automatically to https:// if possible so that MITMs can't read or modify the request or response. I would still get that benefit if the browser made it easy to click through certificate warnings.
However, in general I think the browser preventing the user from doing something the user wants is a bit offputting. The browser is a "user agent". It should act on behalf of the user. If the user wants it to do something, it should do that. This case is tricky, because sometimes what the user really wants is not what the user is asking the user agent to do. It's an xy problem. I think Chrome's current behavior strikes a nice balance.