SSLO Security policies; do we still need the Pinners category?
Playing with SSLO again, and came across the Pinners category in the Security Policy (category of website that is immediately bypassing SSLO due to the use of Pinned certificates).
(More detail on Certificate Pinning:
https://community.f5.com/t5/technical-articles/implementing-ssl-orchestrator-guided-configuration/ta-p/285880
https://owasp.org/www-community/controls/Certificate_and_Public_Key_Pinning
It seems that HTTP pinning and Certificate pinning has now mostly been deprecated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Public_Key_Pinning & https://www.digicert.com/blog/certificate-pinning-what-is-certificate-pinning , but the Pinners category still exist. I've removed quite a few of the domains from the category, tested again with Forged certificates, and all sites still work! (which I believe they shouldn't if Pinning was still in place at those sites. And Google classically being one of the biggest users of Pinning initially isn't even in the Pinners category anymore.
So, should SSLO still configure the Pinners category by default, or should it now be removed by default and Pinning only be kept in the back of our minds in the case we do come across a website that uses it? (Or 3rd and just as likely option - have I completely misunderstood something?
Certificate pinning was never intended for browser traffic.
In the simplest sense, modern browsers contain TWO CA trust stores - a system-level and separate user-level store, and a policy that says, basically, that a pinned certificate violation shall be ignored if the issuer is trusted via the user-level trust store. So in an SSL forward proxy, when you import the CA certificate to the clients, you're placing that CA in the user-level trust store, thus negating the effects of certificate pinning.
What is not covered, however, are non-browser agents that do certificate pinning. These are typically your antivirus and OS/software update agents. These non-browser agents have a single CA trust store and thus must honor all certification pinning validations. Without the pinners category in SSLO, these agents would break.