What is Certificate Pinning and how to deal with SSL Decryption

rmeddane — Thu, 02 May 2024 16:16:36 GMT

Certificate pinning was developped to help prevent man in the middle attack.

But what is the Certificate Pinning?

Traditionally, SSL Handshake consists on the validation of the server’s certificate, let’s say collab.com. The validation is done using the CA’s certificate located in the certificate store of the web browser.

The certificate store contains several CA Certificates, may be more than 100.

If at least one CA delivers by mistake or more likely to conduct an attack a valid certificate for example *.collab.com, attackers are able to launch a Man In The Middle Attack.

in order to prevent this attack, it is possible to use the SSL protocol in another way, by creating an association between the domain name of a site (www.collab.com) and the certificate or certification authority expected. Thus, only the a certificate (of collab.com) signed by one of the specific certification authorities will be accepted and if the certificate of collab.com signed by another CA is presented, it is not trusted.

Certificate pinning can be explained with a simple words: Is this connection secure with a valid certificate and is it signed by the CA I’m expecting?.

Some applications use a technique referred to as TLS/SSL pinning or certificate pinning, which embeds the fingerprint of the original server certificate in the application itself. As a result, if you configured a TLS/SSL rule with a SSL Forward Proxy action, and this rule matches this traffic, when the application receives a resigned certificate from Palo Alto Firewall the validation fails and the connection is aborted.

In the capture wireshark from the client side connection or the application you can detect this failed validation with the TLS alert message , The Alert Message indicates the spoofed re-signed certificate is not recognized by the application because the application is expecting to receive and validate only server certificate signed by a specific CA (Certification Authority) but it is receiving the server certificate signed by the Firewall, finally a TCP Reset is sent by the application to close the TCP connection.

If your browsers or your applications uses certificate pinning to verify a server certificate, you cannot decrypt this traffic by re-signing the server certificate.

To allow access to the website that uses a certificate pinning, you can add the hostname of the server in the SSL Decryption Exclusion List. The hostname is compared to the SNI in the Client Hello Message and the Common Name in the Server Certificate, if a match is found the firewall excludes the traffic from decryption.

Re: What is Certificate Pinning and how to deal with SSL Decryption

S_Williams901 — Thu, 02 May 2024 15:36:11 GMT

What does cert pinning on a global scale do to ssl inspection for the future?

Re: What is Certificate Pinning and how to deal with SSL Decryption

ThomasObarowski — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 20:29:13 GMT

Make it non-functional. SSL Inspection is essentially a sanctioned man-in-the-middle attack.

Re: What is Certificate Pinning and how to deal with SSL Decryption

S_Williams901 — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 12:59:22 GMT

We shall see what vendor comes to surface with a solution for this in the future. Unfortunately, now you cannot see any malicious content in encrypted ssl packets.

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What is Certificate Pinning and how to deal with SSL Decryption

Re: What is Certificate Pinning and how to deal with SSL Decryption

Re: What is Certificate Pinning and how to deal with SSL Decryption

Re: What is Certificate Pinning and how to deal with SSL Decryption