Gogo no longer replacing Digital Certificates on sites? Maybe

Good morning from US1510 as I’m my next leg to Phoenix, Arizona.

Time to update a story that I looked into earlier this week, when Gogo wireless were appearing to do man in the middle attacks by inserting their own certificates to manage traffic to streaming sites – such as Youtube.

Well, being at 35,000 fit using GoGo today (But buy it on the ground – $16 vs $30 or so on the plane), I decided to try for myself.

Bear in mind, this is my personal laptop, which probably isn’t a good indicator in the least, but it’s worth a try. These trials were conducted in Mozilla FireFox and Google Chrome.

From what I could see –  the Certificates had been swapped back to normal.

Mozilla FireFox –  10th January 2015, 16:25GMT/09:25EST.

Google Chrome – 10th January 2015, 16:37GMT/9:37GMT

Man in the middle style attack – or replacing a certificate with your own certificate is a poor way to inspire security, and is akin to using a sledgehammer to smash a salted peanut that’s been out in the cold for a few hours.

Better ways such as Access Control Lists or even Proxy blocking/Content blocking would have achieved the same result.

I’ll continue my testing as the day goes on my next US Airways flight with Gogo aboard (as well as testing it on the way back), but this is a positive move in my book.

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