I have multiple things running through a reverse proxy and I’ve never had trouble accessing them until now. The two hospitals are part of the same company, so their network setup is probably identical.

Curiously, it’s not that the sites can’t be found, but instead my browser complains that it’s not secure.

So I don’t think it’s a DNS problem, but I wonder what the hospital is doing to the data.

All I could come up with in my research is this article about various methods of intercepting traffic. https://blog.cloudflare.com/performing-preventing-ssl-stripping-a-plain-english-primer/

Since my domain name is one that requires https (.app), the browser doesn’t allow me to bypass the warning.

Is this just some sort of super strict security rules at the hospital? I doubt they’re doing anything malicious, but it makes me wonder.

Thanks!

Also, if you know of any good networking Lemmy communities, feel free to share them.

  • lemmyvoreEnglish
    15•4 months ago

    You’re getting a bad TLS certificate. If you press the Advanced button you should be able to see a reason why the certificate is not accepted by the browser.

    It can be any reason, for example I got this error when one of my certificates expired (because I messed around with the DNS API token’s permissions and didn’t test it afterwards).

    In your case it’s probably not an expired certificate because then you’d see that error everywhere not just on the hospital WiFi.

    I suspect that whoever controls that WiFi is trying to hijack your connection, but it won’t work because once a browser has seen a HSTS flag it will refuse to connect to that site in any way except TLS (with the correct certificate ofc).

    Kudos for enabling HSTS btw, excellent move.

    I’ll be very curious to see what the browser says the reason is.

    And yes the HSTS error is completely unhelpful in this scenario. The fact HSTS blocks the connection is secondary, the much more important detail is why TLS could not be established.

    It’s like if your house key didn’t work and you were told “you know, doors require a key to be unlocked”. You’d be like “dude, I know, I have the key right here, why isn’t it working?”