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Re: AT&T mobile intercepting TCP sockets?


From: Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuhnke () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 21 May 2018 13:50:51 -0700

The short answer is, yes.

This is a strong argument in favor of three things:

a) Redirect all http trafifc on webservers you control to https , such as
the following apache2 configuration file snippet for a virtualhost

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =domainname.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =www.domainname.com
RewriteRule ^ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [END,QSA,R=permanent]


b) Force TLS1.2 on all connections, the population of web browsers that do
not understand TLS1.2 is now less than 1% by market share.

c) Use HTTPS strict transport security


On Mon, May 21, 2018 at 12:35 PM, Chris Adams <cma () cmadams net> wrote:

I ran into an odd issue with access to a website I manage from AT&T
mobile devices this weekend.  The website worked for everybody not on
AT&T mobile, and AT&T mobile users could access other sites; the problem
was just this combination.

Android and iOS phones, as well as a Linux system tethered to an Android
phone, all had the same problem.  On the Linux system, I disabled IPv6
in Firefox, and it could then connect.  Browsers got various "connection
reset" type errors; on Linux, I could telnet to port 80 or 443, and it
would connect and immediately close.

The site does have an IPv6 address, but I had missed getting the
webserver to listen on IPv6 (my mistake).  Adding that looks to have
solved the problem.

When I ran tcpdump on the server and had someone try to connect from
their AT&T mobile iPhone, I saw three connection attempts a few tenths
of a second apart (all refused by the server).

My question is this: is AT&T mobile intercepting the TCP socket (and
not handling "connection refused" correctly)?  Is that a known thing?

--
Chris Adams <cma () cmadams net>



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