HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a critical security feature that allows a site to say “always use the secure HTTPS version, not the insecure unencrypted one”. There is a chicken-and-egg effect where the first time you access a website, you have no way to know if your site has HSTS turned on or not without accessing it, so browsers distribute a “HSTS Preload” list of domains for which it is turned on even if you have never accessed it before, as explained by Adam Langley of the Google Security Team. On Chromium based browsers you can check by accessing chrome://net-internals/#hsts. Yours truly is on the list, which means that almost every single device on the planet has a file with my name in it, to my never-ceasing amusement.

Someone asserted that most e-commerce and financial sites are registered with HSTS Preload. I have a pretty jaundiced view of banks’ security, the fact most of them consider sending 6-digit codes by SMS a valid form of two-factor authentication leads me to believe they mostly engage in security theater. So I used the official Google Chrome HSTS Preload portal to check.

I was shocked to find out that in fact not only is HSTS Preload very rare, but even HSTS itself is hardly present. None of the sites I checked use either:

Not even Amazon.com has it, despite being a company that operates a Certificate Authority.

The only explanation I can think of is that this is a deliberate product decision to make life easier on those annoying free WiFi with captive portals, at the expense of security.

Captive portals are those WiFi networks that don’t support IEEE 802.11u Hotspot 2.0, which means that instead of showing you a popup when you connect to WiFi asking you to agree to the terms of service, sign in to a paid WiFi service or whatever, it will instead hijack the first non-TLS HTTP request and show you the captive portal page instead (pro tip: use neverssl.com as the first page you access on those portals). If you were to only access https://amazon.com/, you would hang forever, whereas with http://amazon.com/ you would first get the captive portal page, then on reload the actual Amazon page.

The flip side is that anyone can set up a WiFi pineapple and SSLstrip in a Starbucks to impersonate their free WiFi, hijack your connection by issuing a deauthentication frame to force you to disconnect from Starbucks’ WiFi and connect instead to your fake Starbucks WiFi, and then the attacker can use the SSL stripping described by Adam Langley to steal your Amazon password, even if you have two-factor authentication enabled. Given how easy Amazon has made it to impersonate them, I am surprised this kind of scam is not more prevalent.