Avast installs a certificate in the local certificate store in Windows (certmgr.msc) and into Firefox (because Mozilla doesn't use the global or OS cert store but instead its own private cert store) for its MITM (man-in-the-middle) scheme of intercepting HTTPS traffic. That scheme allows Avast, Bitdefender, and other anti-virus software to peek inside the HTTPS web traffic (encrypted content) to check for malicious content.
However, Google came out with their QUIC protocol that is supposed to reduce the number of communications in establishing a connection and session between client and server. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIChttps://www.fastvue.co/fastvue/blog/googles-quic-protocols-security-and-reporting-implications/That started back in 2012. Google Chrome has a flag to enable QUIC to work with those sites that support it: chrome://flags/#enable-quic. While it seemed an option to speed up Chrome when making connections, apparently it renders Avast incapable of interrogating that web traffic. I found the following BitDefender article that says to disable QUIC, so BitDefender can interrogate the SSL/TLS encrypted web traffic, which is at:
https://www.bitdefender.com/support/how-to-disable-quic-protocol-in-google-chrome-1669.htmlI don't how much the QUIC protocol (or SPDY or HTTP2) has been adopted by web sites. If sites are adopting these protocols, can Avast still protect users from malicious content at malicious or compromised sites?
I was visiting chrome://flags when I came upon the QUIC flag in Google Chrome. I thought it might help speed up Chrome a wee bit and anything faster is desirable. Then I started researching and saw BitDefender recommends against using QUIC. Since BitDefender is using the same MITM scheme using a local cert to interrogate encrypted web traffic (over HTTPS), I started to wonder if Avast would be similarly constricted on its protection if QUIC were enabled in the web browser.
