EU Article 45 requires that browsers trust certificate authorities appointed by governments

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨L4s@lemmy.world [bot]⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/11/article-45-will-roll-back-web-security-12-years

EU Article 45 requires that browsers trust certificate authorities appointed by governments::The EU is poised to pass a sweeping new regulation, eIDAS 2.0. Buried deep in the text is Article 45, which returns us to the dark ages of 2011, when certificate authorities (CAs) could collaborate with governments to spy on encrypted traffic—and get away with it. Article 45 forbids browsers from…

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pastermil@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
What the fuck is EU doing? Why are they trying so hard to participate in the enshitification effort?

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- MeanEYE@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Personal ID cards have certificates on them issued by the government. These certificates can be used for anything from digitally signing documents to logging in to government web sites without having yet another user/pass. So far situations was a nightmare.
  
  Government provided tools and plugins for browsers to support logging in and signing, but it’s been a shitshow when it comes to support. Pretty much only Windows and only certain versions of it and even then it worked half of the time. You had to install certificate manually and trust, etc. Am assuming this is to make sure these services work but also so they can issue certificates for their own web sites.
  
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  - pastermil@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Personal digital certificate sounds like an awesome concept. Too bad the implementation seems so narrow-minded. Typical beaureaucrats.
    
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  - uis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    And they don’t even use custom crypto!
    
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Send_me_nude_girls@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Great and in 2 -3 years we find out, that someone has actively abused this security hole for years and stole whatever master key is required, to create their own fake government CA and has been spying on everyone for years. Or political opposition was imprisoned before they could act. Best is, such man in the middle attacks allow for all sorts of things, including putting fake evidence on your computer.

Oh yes, no one would ever do that every, totally never happened and won’t. Nazis will also never come back. What, they soon are the biggest party in Germany, in other countries too? And will dictate rules in the EU? No one could see that happening…

Where there’s honey, there will be bears.

I just hope we can create a browser plugin to deny gov CAs automatically or a browser from outside EU to block that shit. …until your ISP is forced by law to block traffic from these.

One step closer to a great EU firewall and it sucks. Good old salami tactics. Because at some point it doesn’t even matter if there are ways to mitigate this spying, if the alternative are so complicated and uncomfortable to use, that 99,999% of the people won’t bother.

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- vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  Nazis will also never come back. What, they soon are the biggest party in Germany, in other countries too?
  
  Calling AfD Nazis is an exaggeration watering down the term.
  
  I’m not saying actual honest-to-God Nazis are not coming back. In fact, I’m sure they are, no evil is ever defeated forever. Time to cast away stones and time to collect stones.
  
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  - Zacryon@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    Calling AfD Nazis is an exaggeration watering down the term.
    
    The Verfassungsschutz (Office for Protection of the Constitution) classified the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt as right-wing extremists just last Tuseday. A year before that the AfD Thuringia was classified similarly by the respective Landesverfassungsschutz (State’s Office for Protection of the Cnstitution), but was reclassified a level just before that as a suspected extremist right-wing party by the federal constitution protection office. The AfD-Juniors (“Junge Alternative”) were classified as right-wing extremists last April by the Verfassungsschutz.
    
    They regularly catch ones attention with antisemitic, xenophobic statements at best and inhumane, anti-democratic sentiments at worst.
    
    Considering that they start to get more and more political posts on a communal level, and remembering that the communal political landscape played a pivotal role for the rise of the NSDAP (I would provide a source, but it’s in German) I would certainly say that’s something to be very worried about.
    
    I don’t know what else you need. They speak like Nazis, they act like Nazis. They are Nazis. Just because they haven’t reached that level of political power to set Jews and foreigners on fire again, doesn’t mean they are harmless or that calling them out for what they are would “water down the term ‘Nazi’”.
    
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  - yetAnotherUser@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    A party tolerating Nazis in their ranks is not worth differentiating from a party made entirely out of Nazis.
    
    Ya know, if politicians have Himmler’s instruction to produce more “aryan” babies hanging in their room as a poster, it is safe to say it’s a Nazi party.
    
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- akrot@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Can someone tldr about the issue? I’m dumb?
  
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  - imapuppetlookaway@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Me too. This video helped a lot: www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Df5_cojAs
    
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DieguiTux8623@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
You know, they are not being autocratic, it’s for people’s own good, to protect children and other “random bullshit go!” things.

Unless we act, we’re doomed. This is the new “nobles and clergymen”, only it’s “riches and beurocrats”.

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- properlypurple@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Capitalism is just feudalism in new clothes. 😓
  
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  - snorkbubs@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Serfs in Gucci belts.
    
    Ah, who am I kidding? Serfs had a far better work/life balance than most people in the developed world today. They had to use regular belts, though, so it all balances out.
    
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ShunkW@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
What a fucking nightmare. And I thought the US was bad about trying to encroach more on privacy.

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- MeanEYE@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Am thinking this looks like a nightmare but their intentions are actually different. However giving any kind of power to government is almost universally bad idea since it’s guaranteed to be abused, no matter the initial reason it was added.
  
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  - ShunkW@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    There’s literally zero reason for this that isn’t shady.
    
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PinkPanther@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Where and how do we complain? This is really bad…

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- kewko@lemdro.id ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  …europa.eu/…/how-make-complaint-eu-level_en
  
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ExLisper@linux.community ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Jesus, this is not about spaying. This is because browsers have history of sucking at trusting new certificate authorities.

In Spain you get private certificate on your ID. You can use this ID to sing documents and access government pages. Those certificates are signed and provided by the government institution responsible for printing money (Royal Mint). It took them like 10 years to get the root cert added to the main browsers so that people could authenticate using those certs on government pages. It still doesn’t work very well and I have to manually trust certs on Linux. I think I don’t have to explain why being able to identify yourself on govt pages would be great.

What’s the security risk here? People really think that the Spanish spy agency would request certs signed by the Royal Mint for 3rd party domain and use those for MITM attack? When they are caught this would raise huuuuge stink, Spanish govt certs would get banned and Royal Mint would lose all credibility. I’m not saying they are definitely not stupid enough to try it but they would only be able to do it once.

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- I_like_cats@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  They wouldn’t get banned. That’s the problem. The article mandates that these certificates are exempt from the usual repercussions for acting out
  
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  - ExLisper@linux.community ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    You would get warnings from the browser, plugins removing those certs and versions of browsers without them (EU version and non-EU version). I
    
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- silencioso@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  I’m not saying they are definitely not stupid enough to try it but they would only be able to do it once.
  
  They will the caught and they will do it again and again. Normies they don’t give a fuck about privacy or certificates.
  
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- crispy_kilt@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  This isn’t it. You can use a separate CA for identification and for websites (TLS). If this were the problem, they could use any existing CA for their websites and their own for identifying the user - since that doesn’t involve the browser trusting the ID CA.
  
  See RFC 5280, Section 4.2.1.3, Key Usage: datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5280#section-4.2…
  
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  - ExLisper@linux.community ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I guess you’re right. Maybe it is about spying after all.
    
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- Slotos@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  When it comes to regulations, intent doesn’t matter when they enable abuse of power.
  
  I don’t give a fuck if this is not aimed at spying. It trivially allows it, and that’s what matters.
  
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- MeanEYE@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  It should be every country in EU and those looking to join to have certificates on their id cards. Am thinking they are just trying to expedite the process. EU could easily create their own regulatory body and get approved by other root certificate holders to establish path of trust, but most likely it complicates things and/or takes too long.
  
  Not to sound too pessimistic but making a browser trust another certificate is not that difficult. If they wanted to MITM attack anyone it would be fairly easy given that people usually install software from any source let alone government without thinking twice. During that installation another certificate can be added to the list of trusted roots and problem solved. It wouldn’t be harder to achieve and it would be much harder to detect.
  
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  - ExLisper@linux.community ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    but most likely it complicates things and/or takes too long.
    
    It’s not very complicated but it does take too long: bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435736
    
    It took them 10 years to resolve this request.
    
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- vimdiesel@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Whatever their “intent” it fucking dumb and an invasion of privacy with no real justification. Governments don’t need to see what I’m doing on the internet.
  
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Adanisi@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Oh HELL NO

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sonymegadrive@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

That means cryptographic keys under one government’s control could be used to intercept HTTPS communication

Could someone smarter than me explain how this would be possible? Wouldn’t the browser still be able to enforce privacy between the client and origin? Or is it the case that certificates issued by these CAs could in theory only support weaker cyphers?

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- wdx@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  There can be an infinite amount of certificates for a single domain.
  
  When you setup a connection to a website you basically get a response back that has been signed with a certificate.
  
  Your Browser / OS has a list of certification authorities that it deems trustworthy.
  
  So when you get the response the browser checks if the certificate was issued by a trusted CA.
  
  Now, if the EU forces browsers to trust their CA they can facilitate a man-in-the-middle attack.
  
  In this instance they will intercept the TLS Handshake and give you back a response that was signed by their certificate. Your Browser deems the certificate valid and sets up a secure tunnel to the EUs Server.
  
  From then on they can forward packets between you and the real website while being able to read everything in cleartext
  
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- Pfosten@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Cryptography works. At least until sufficiently powerful quantum computers arrive, TLS reliably ensures confidentiality between your browser and the server. No one else can snoop on the data transmitted via that connection.
  
  But are you connected to the right server? Without some kind of authentication, any adversary in the middle (such as your ISP) could impersonate the real server.
  
  That is where certificates come in. They are issued by neutral certificate authorities (CAs) that check the identity. It works something like this:
  
  I, the server operator, create a private key on that server. I use that key to create a certificate request which asks the CA to give me a certificate. This request also contains the domain names for which the key shall be used.
  
  The CA performs identity checks.
  
  The CA issues me the certificate. I install it on my server. Now, when browsers create a TLS connection I can tell them: here’s my public key you can use to check my identity, and here’s a certificate that shows that this is a valid key for this domain name!
  
  The browser will validate the certificate and see if the domain name matches one of the names in the certificate.
  
  What kind of checks are done depends on the CA. I’ve obtained certificates by appearing in person at a counter, showing my government ID, and filling out a form. Nowadays more common is the ACME protocol which enables automated certificate issuance. With ACME, the CA connects to the server from multiple network locations (making interception unlikely) and checks if the server provides a certain authentication token.
  
  To know which certificates are valid, browsers must know which CAs are trusted. Browser makers and CAs have come together to create an evolving standard of minimum requirements that CAs must fulfill to be eligible for inclusion in the browser’s default trust store. If a CA violates this (for example by creating certificates that can be used for government traffic interception, or by creating a certificate without announcing it in a public transparency list), then future browser versions will remove them, making all their certificates worthless.
  
  eIDAS 2 has the effect of circumventing all of this. There is to be a government-controlled CA (already high-risk) that has its own verification rules set by legislation (does not meet industry standard rules). And browsers would be legally forced to include the eIDAS CAs as “trusted”.
  
  This puts browsers in a tough spot because they’ve resisted these kinds of requests from authoritarian regimes in the past. But now the world’s largest trade bloc is asking. Browsers can comply or leave the EU market, or maybe provide a less secure EU edition? Awakens uncomfortable memories around the failed US attempts at cryptography export control (cryptography is considered a munition, like hand grenades or ballistic missiles).
  
  It is plausible that the EU is doing this with good intentions: having a digital identity scheme is useful, it makes sense for identity to be government-controlled (like passports), and such a scheme will only see success if it sees industry adoption. The EU has also seen that hoping for voluntary industry adoption doesn’t generally work, e.g. see the USB-C mandate.
  
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  - topperharlie@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    you seem to know what you are talking about and I looked into this very long ago, maybe you can help me understand.
    
    From what I can understand reading most of the article this forces browsers to accept the certificates, but it doesn’t force the websites to use them, right?
    
    So what is stopping Firefox from showing a warning (like the lock icon being orange, but it could also be a more intrusive message) stating that the certificate was issued by a country and/or doesn’t fullfil modern security standards in case one of these CAs is used?
    
    On top of that, the CA doesn’t really encrypt the private key of the domain, it just adds a signature stating that the message with the salt and the public key are legit, right? everyone seems to think the government itself will be able to passively see the traffic, but if I remember correctly they would have to gateway the whole transaction (I’m guessing the browser will also have a cache of keys and this could become a bit tricky to do in a global way)
    
    But of course we all know how technologically illiterate governments are (there could be one good, but there will be some “less good” for sure). So yeah, it does sound like a horrible idea to begin with. Because if a CA starts being insecure nowadays browsers can just remove them and go with their life, but if there is a law forcing browsers wouldn’t be able to.
    
    I’m just curious about the specifics in case I’m outdated on what I remember.
    
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- CrabLangEnjoyer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  The government CA could just issue a new certificate for let’s say Google, force your ISP to return a wrong IP when you ask your ISPs dns server what the address of Google is and then return a fake Google page instead or forward traffic to Google on your behalf and read all data. And since your browser trusts the new fake Google certificate from the government you won’t get any https error or warning.
  
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- peeteer@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  A government could create a new certificate for any domain without having ownership of the domain or permission of the owner. This way they can perform Man-in-the-middle attacks.
  
  In such an attack someone intercepts the traffic of a client and presents their own certificate.
  
  Because a government can create a universally accepted certificate, thise would be accepted as valid. The traffic can then be decrypted and forwarded to the real website. The attacker is now between the client and the real host (the Man in the middle) and can view the unencrypted traffic.
  
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- krigo666@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  The CA (Certification Authority) is what validates the encryption certificates that TLS uses in HTTPS. In this case it can certify a cypher that can be used in a site’s certificates and be known to a government agency (the 3rd party) and used to decrypt the HTTPS stream. This basically an Man-In-The-Middle attack.
  
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- vagabond@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  When a website uses HTTPS they have a certificate that proves who they are. Your device uses that certificate to encrypt your data so that only that service can decrypt it. The issue is that it’s just a file and anyone can make one. So to determine whether I trust your certificate I need it to be cryptographically signed by someone I already trust. These are the certificate authorities.
  
  If I was a certificate authority that your device trusts then I could create a certificate for any domain and your device would believe me. Meaning I could sit between you and any web service and have you encrypt things with my certiiicate in a way that lets me decrypt everything before forwarding it to the service and you would never know.
  
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WuTang@lemmy.ninja ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
knowing that EU commission is full of IT “campers” waiting to reimburse their mortgage and they will probably outsource the work to india (despite being forbidden), i am not really fond of the idea.

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- onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  “camper”?
  
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daniskarma@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Seems great, if they achieve the same security standards as a private company I don’t see why we cannot have public CAs.

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- BritishDuffer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  And how long will it take for intelligence agencies to start issuing fake but trusted certificates for surveillance?
  
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  - killeronthecorner@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Yes, private companies are invulnerable to this ploy
    
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  - onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    They don’t already?
    
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  - uis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    They already do it.
    
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uis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Can we at least admit that requiring CAs is not how ecryption in Internet should work? Just FYI there is already distributed public key infrastructure: DNS(DNSSEC).

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- Slotos@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  You gotta love confident statements that don’t stand to scrutiny.
  
  DNSSEC keys are signed in the same recursive manner SSL certificates are. If I, as a government, block your access to root servers and provide you my own servers, I can spoof anything I want. It’s literally the same bloody problem.
  
  Chain of trust doesn’t disappear just because you use a new acronym.
  
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  - uis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    DNSSEC keys are signed in the same recursive manner SSL certificates are.
    
    That’s why I said there is already there is already distributed PKI.
    
    Chain of trust doesn’t disappear just because you use a new acronym.
    
    The thing with SSL, for you, as a government, one of 142 root certificates is enough to spoof on any domain, while DNS has only one root certificate and good luck getting that. And if you don’t trust DNS, then who you even trust then? DNS is how major CAs check if you really own that domain. Because, you know, domains are part of DNS. Shocking, I know.
    
    Or you can use public keys as addresses somewhere like I2P.
    
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sanpo@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Nice clickbait title, man…

It’s still a proposal for now.

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- vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  History of the EU has shown that proposals become directives unless enough people make a stink. This is the stink.
  
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  - sanpo@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    No, EFF that’s linked here is doing a good job.
    
    OP is just using shitty titles to stir up drama.
    
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- clb92@feddit.dk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  For now…
  
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LemmyIsFantastic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Fuck the EU. Fuck ruining my built in phone batteries too.

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some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
That’s some bullshit.

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vimdiesel@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Surely they can’t force say US browser companies to do this to browsers downloaded from the USA?

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