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A malicious router (or any entity between you and the site you're trying to connect to) redirecting your traffic is the exact situation that HTTPS protects against.



It does not. Redirection from the router involves only TCP and DNS actions. HTTPS does not encrypt TCP. HTTPS is an encrypted tunnel that rides over TCP. HTTPS is a layer 7 protocol while TCP is a layer 4 protocol. You can encrypt TCP as well if you are using IPSEC. IPSEC is built into IPv6 by default, but it fails with NAT over IPv4, which is still most of the internet.

None of that is what HTTPS is for though. The primary function of HTTPS is to prevent HTTP traffic from being sent in the clear so that anybody could read it.


If the user is trying to access https://example.com, and an attacker redirects the TCP connection (or fakes a response to the DNS query so the user gets the wrong IP address) to a server that doesn't have the private key for example.com's HTTPS certificate, then the HTTPS connection will fail. The attacker is unable to serve their own content to the user as "https://example.com". HTTPS doesn't just encrypt the connection, but also authenticates the integrity of connections as being from the domain they claim to be from.


https://www.computerworld.com/article/2897815/microsoft-blac...

Spoofing a certificate isn't trivial but fraudulent certificates are a thing. This is why there are revocation lists and OCSP.




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