So this video explains how https works. What I don’t get is what if a hacker in the middle pretended to be the server and provided me with the box and the public key. wouldn’t he be able to decrypt the message with his private key? I’m not a tech expert, but just curious and trying to learn.
It is trivial for an attacker to make self-signed TLS certs, and you can absolutely just click “continue” on sites that use them when you get a warning from the browser
What browser is that?
Firefox, Chrome, Edge, will all warn you about self-signed certs or cert mismatches but allow you to continue. You’re completely correct that SSL/TLS needs a certificate, but it doesn’t need to be CA issued or in any way legitimate for the encrypted tunnel to be established
I am personally using firefox and referencing my own servers that use their own self-signed TLS certs that I have not bothered to load onto my pc because they aren’t public, but chromium-based browsers aren’t some outlier here
Your own servers probably also dont have HSTS enabled, or clicking continue will be disabled (if not overwritten in your browser-config)
Reading the HSTS spec, it doesn’t work on first connection, and while most people are using websites they access more than once, that notably isn’t all web use.
It would be inherently impossible for HSTS to work on first connection, you are correct.