[HN Gopher] Last Chance to fix eIDAS: Secret EU law threatens In...
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Last Chance to fix eIDAS: Secret EU law threatens Internet security
Author : mnot
Score : 471 points
Date : 2023-11-02 05:57 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (last-chance-for-eidas.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (last-chance-for-eidas.org)
| jruohonen wrote:
| Oh dear, shooting on one's foot once again.
|
| Fortunately, they cannot forbid a natural person from removing
| any given certificate. If this passes, I am sure we have
| blacklists and scripts for these in no time.
| mbwgh wrote:
| I guess this is where client attestation comes into play.
| g_p wrote:
| Or, proliferation of the English (US) or English (UK)
| versions of browsers, which refuse to (and are not obliged
| to) include any of these CAs...
|
| I suspect if this ever does play out, it could result in
| fewer people using "EU spec" browsers, and more people using
| the international overseas version, thus undermining the
| entire intention of the policy proposal.
|
| It seems a pretty safe bet no browser maker would ship these
| CAs to users outside of the EU (and maybe EEA).
| mbwgh wrote:
| That's great if you are not going to be legally and
| technically required to use these EU spec browsers to be
| able to access your online banking or any platform
| registered as doing business in Europe.
|
| The EU is playing the long game here I believe.
| jahav wrote:
| I suspect such versions won't comply with Cyber Resilience
| Act (=company would be on hook for a fine). Browsers are in
| category 2 iirc.
|
| Edit: rest of world might be fine(big maybe, these things
| have tendency to proliferate),eu citizens... screws are
| tightening.
| justinclift wrote:
| New Firefox plugin: "Disable EU Certs"
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| EU court: serves Mozilla a court order to add the extension
| to the blocklist.xml file, a global blocklist of all
| extension IDs that users can't install.
| justinclift wrote:
| Sure, and thereby begins yet another game of whack-a-mole
| as people create ever more elaborate workarounds.
| g-b-r wrote:
| and as ever less people have the working workaround
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| Soon: "Mozilla removes plugin from website and prevents
| installation for weakening security"
| jruohonen wrote:
| From:
|
| https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-14959-2022-...
|
| Article 45(2): "Qualified certificates for website authentication
| referred to in paragraph 1 shall be recognised by web-browsers.
| For those purposes web-browsers shall ensure that the identity
| data provided using any of the methods is displayed in a user
| friendly manner. Web-browsers shall ensure support and
| interoperability with qualified certificates for website
| authentication referred to in paragraph 1, with the exception of
| enterprises, considered to be microenterprises and small
| enterprises in accordance with Commission Recommendation
| 2003/361/EC in the first 5 years of operating as providers of
| web-browsing services."
|
| Article 45a(3): "A qualified electronic attestation of attributes
| issued in one Member State shall be recognised as a qualified
| electronic attestation of attributes in any other Member State".
|
| Article 45a(4): "An attestation of attributes issued by or on
| behalf of a public sector body responsible for an authentic
| source shall be recognised as an attestation of attributes issued
| by or on behalf of a public sector body responsible for an
| authentic source in all Member States."
| execveat wrote:
| Allow the eIDAS certificates, but limit them to the country
| code TLDs to match the jurisdiction of the certificate issuer.
| agwa wrote:
| That text is almost a year old. The recent trilogue
| negotiations added paragraph 45(2a) which is not public yet
| (hence the complaints about secrecy) but is alluded to in the
| open letter (https://eidas-open-letter.org):
|
| > The proposed legislation also prevents the introduction of
| security checks when verifying the certificates used for
| encrypted web traffic in Art 45, (2a). As written, this
| language requires that the EU's website certificates not be
| subjected to any mandatory requirements beyond those specified
| in ETSI standards.
|
| This is awful, as it would forbid browsers from requiring
| Certificate Transparency, or banning a weak hash algorithm
| (like SHA-1), or requiring post-quantum keys unless the EU
| agrees to it.
| judiisis wrote:
| India is also preparing legislation for OS and browser having
| their CA, they also launched their own web browser challenge
| https://iwbdc.in/ .They were earlier removed due to unauthorised
| issuances https://pkic.org/2014/07/24/in-the-wake-of-
| unauthorized-cert...
| pxeger1 wrote:
| I'm assuming this another... misguided... attempt by the security
| services to make their jobs easier. The grip that intelligence
| communities apparently have on our governments is ridiculous. Why
| do they have such influence?
| derelicta wrote:
| Western security services are what we call secret police in
| other parts of the world. Its goal is to protect the local
| status quo. That's it, and thats why it can assert so much
| influence.
| kossTKR wrote:
| This is one of the most important and least talked about
| power dynamics.
|
| This is because that world is hidden to most people but would
| have just 20 years ago been covered by classical research
| journalism, namely the intersections between power, fiscal
| policy, law, the security state, foreign policy and mass
| media or other systems of control.
|
| Politics and policy making is downstream from mostly non
| public clubs of people. Become a part of the security
| apparatus to gain power and draft plans for whole regions of
| the world and the future of society. The rest of us get to
| see their own self branding in Hollywood romantizations and
| ideological "event driven" smokescreens that cover the
| realpolitcal battles of power and resources that actually
| drive history.
|
| That way the masses end up seeing the good fights for
| "Democracy", "Child safety", "Necessary financial bailouts"
| or "Primitive stupid people in X country need intervention"
| while these are all covering a big old game of Risk or
| Civilization ie. resource plundering, land grabs, violent
| exploitation of foreign markets, siphoning of wealth from the
| masses to the few, and panopticon-level systems of control
| implemented to keep dissent and enlightenment about these
| fact as much in the dark as possible.
|
| Theres a reason the richest European families already took an
| interest in controlling the emerging postal services of
| several hundreds years ago just like early pamphlet media but
| somehow these very old facts have been so memoryholed
| everyone thinks we live in a somewhat meritocratic or even
| democratic society these days.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| Probably not really. The EU itself (at the Brussels level)
| doesn't have much of an intelligence apparatus. One exists but
| it's small and weak compared to the likes of the NSA. The most
| capable was GCHQ but of course that's no longer a part of the
| EU.
|
| The EU likes passing internet related legislation because of:
|
| 1. The politics of it. It involves the raw exercise of power
| over people who are easily bullied and that they don't like
| much, namely successful American companies. The EU loves
| passing extra-territorial laws and seeing people jump, it makes
| them feel like a big power bloc which is the whole aim of the
| EU project to begin with.
|
| 2. The revenue from it. Tech companies either fight or they try
| to obey, but the laws are vague and easily reinterpreted. This
| yields massive fines which go straight into the EU coffers,
| money which is then spent on purchasing loyalty both of the
| elected political elites (via post-election-loss sinecures and
| enormous "pensions" that start being paid out long before
| retirement), and the population itself (via EU branded projects
| and grants).
|
| 3. The unaccountability of it. EU law is created by the
| Commission which does whatever it wants. By treaty it is
| accountable to nothing except itself and it is the highest
| power in Europe. In that situation why _not_ spend all your
| time on easily achieved upper-class luxury agenda items like
| internet regulation, which feels futuristic and cool, instead
| of messy stuff that bothers the regular citizens like illegal
| immigration, where you don 't want to do it and failure comes
| easy?
|
| That's why there's a constant flood of tech-related regulation
| coming from the EU. Seeing this specific act in isolation is a
| mistake, it's just the continuation of a long term trend.
| midasuni wrote:
| The en commissioners are appointed by the eu heads of state
| (one each) and subject to confirmation from Parliament
| (congress). Somewhat analogous to the US exec branch.
|
| The commission President is proposed by the council (the
| heads of states) and appointed by parliament.
|
| I'm not aware of the EU arresting random US citizens for
| breaking laws like the gdpr, you're thinking of America and
| the DMCA
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| That's what they claim, but in reality the President of the
| Commission rejects any Commissioner they don't like. This
| isn't meant to happen but eventually Juncker admitted that
| he did it all the time, and that this was considered
| normal.
|
| So the Commissioners are in reality selected by the
| President.
|
| This problem appears in every HN thread about the EU or its
| activities. People argue that it's a legitimate democratic
| structure based on how its treaties say it works, but the
| treaties aren't followed.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| It's intriguing to observe this phenomena on HN where any
| posts critical of the EU will get downvoted, even though it
| is natural for any country or block to try various means to
| show or enforce its power.
|
| And before someone says otherwise, I've seen this playing out
| hundreds of times.
| Jensson wrote:
| It got downvoted since it says this regulation isn't made
| to spy on people. People want to believe it was made for a
| sinister purpose and not just due to naivete.
|
| If you look around you see plenty of people that gets
| upvoted and are critical of EU, so that isn't it.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| We had a recent MITM on jabber.ru[1] conducted by
| Germany, a EU state that was only detected because they
| failed to renew the MITM cert. I have no reason to
| believe making this easier isn't one of the goals of
| EIDAS.
|
| [1] https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/
| chmod775 wrote:
| How can you make this any easier? The ergonomics of
| letsencrypt are probably better than anything the EU
| could come up with.
|
| Fair chance they'll just keep using letsencrypt.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| Eurosceptics aren't welcome here and will usually give up
| rather than burn karma and get throttled.
|
| If you spend time in central Europe you'll see why this
| occurs. Some people have incorporated the EU institutions
| into their personal identity. People will call themselves
| European Citizens although the EU doesn't grant
| citizenship. Businesses will be called Euro-this or Euro-
| that for no obvious reason. You can catch the Eurobus to go
| ride the rollercoasters at the Europa Park then meet their
| famous mascot Ed Euromouse. This stuff is everywhere.
|
| And in some ways, it is understandable. The 20th century
| was wracked by wars between different European empires or
| countries. The assumption at the core of this movement is
| that if everyone has the same social identity and is ruled
| by the same government, then everyone will hold hands and
| there will be peace on Earth. Or at least that bit of it.
|
| But you can't force unity on people. It has to develop
| naturally, through shared experiences and cultures.
| Unfortunately the vision is so enticing that the political
| and credentialed classes in these countries don't want to
| wait, and so attempt to enforce it from the top down via
| schemes that eliminate democracy in favor of power
| transfers towards the Right Sort Of People, the type who
| "get it" and who can then rule unchecked without needing to
| answer to electorates. This is deeply corrupting, but
| because it's an identity issue when this is pointed out
| people feel their personal identity and whole progress
| story is under attack.
| midasuni wrote:
| The post was typical anti gov tin foil hat nonsense. You
| see the same types of posts from people who like camping
| out on compounds in the mid west complaining about "the
| feds"
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| There is nothing about protectionism or a government
| flexing its power that can be construed as "tin foil hat
| nonsense" though.
| alphager wrote:
| Laws are not created by the commission. Laws can be proposed
| by the commission, but must pass an unanimous vote by the
| council (made up of a representative of the government of
| every country) and pass a qualified majority vote in the EU
| parliament.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| The council also uses qualified majority voting and has
| done for nearly a decade.
|
| The Commission is the sole source of legislation. The
| Council cannot change EU law against the will of the
| Commission, so in practice it's a rubber stamp body that
| just always votes yes to everything.
|
| This is what I'm saying in another comment: HN is flooded
| with incorrect claims about how the EU actually works,
| always in the direction of making it sound more accountable
| than it actually is.
| Jensson wrote:
| There is nothing there that says every service must use specific
| certificates, just that browsers should accept certain ones. So
| this in no way breaks encryption for apps who care, this only
| reduces security on apps that wants to reduce security.
|
| For example, if you use private "e2echat.com" it can still use
| safe certs and be safe, the risk is only that
| "governmentchat.com" will use bad certs, which was already a
| risk.
| no_time wrote:
| If "e2echat.com" has no method to explicitly forbid your
| browser from accepting eIDAS certs (via a DNS record or
| something) then your browser will just blindly accept the
| compromised cert when attacked.
|
| This is still very bad.
| Jensson wrote:
| > This is still very bad.
|
| Yes, potentially, but it isn't "another kind of chat
| control".
| g-b-r wrote:
| It's another side of the efforts of going around
| encryption, chat controls deals with communication
| services, this one with browsers
| Jensson wrote:
| But this doesn't force browsers and sites to use weak
| encryption. It is very different.
| g-b-r wrote:
| This forces browsers to accept all the CAs approved by
| the EU states, and you can be certain that some of them
| will be used for decrypting (and if needed modifying) the
| traffic
| Jensson wrote:
| And then you can just tell the browser to not trust those
| CAs and you are safe. This is nothing like "chat
| control". This only lets the government spy on people who
| don't care if the government spies on them.
| yaris wrote:
| IIRC one cannot tell the browser to not trust root CAs,
| that's why all the fuss.
| Jensson wrote:
| Why shouldn't you be able to do that? Seems like a simple
| thing to implement. I get why they want a hardcoded list,
| but I don't get why you can't add a way to block parts of
| that hardcoded list.
| g-b-r wrote:
| web-browsers shall ensure
| Jensson wrote:
| The only requirement is that browsers displays the data.
| The browser can add "warning, this certificate is
| potentially compromised" when it displays it, nothing in
| the current document says browsers aren't allowed to say
| that, just that the browser has to be aware of the
| certificate.
|
| It is similar to how Chrome displays a warning when you
| visit some sites. You can visit the site anyway, but you
| get a warning since Google thinks it is bad.
| yaris wrote:
| Technically correct. But if Firefox displays a big red
| warning when someone's grandma goes to her favourite
| recipe website, and Safari (or Chrome) just display the
| website to grandma (and to the officer on duty, but who
| cares) - how long will Firefox survive?
| agwa wrote:
| It's not clear that a warning would be allowed. In
| particular, the new paragraph 45(2a) prohibits mandatory
| checks on eIDAS certificates.
|
| Mozilla has proposed text[1] that would make clear that
| the requirement is only to display identity information,
| but this text has not been adopted.
|
| [1] https://securityriskahead.eu/wp-
| content/uploads/2023/09/Mozi...
| g-b-r wrote:
| Even without the 45 (2a), _displayed in a user-friendly
| manner_ could already be interpreted to prevent prominent
| warnings
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yes, I agree. The crying wolf is too much sometimes.
|
| Accepting certificates from a given issuer does not give
| them the issuer the right to impersonate others
| g-b-r wrote:
| All root CAs can issue certificates for any site (except
| those with CAA records etc.)
| no_time wrote:
| Luckily, I never said anything like this anywhere.
| gallexme wrote:
| Wouldn't a client certificate from e2echat protect that kind
| of attack ? Since even when a man in the middle offers u a
| server cert u accept, the e2echat servers can't validate the
| client certificate from you anymore
|
| (Still bad but would at least protect connections from ever
| talking to e2echats servers)
| Filligree wrote:
| Nobody uses client certs.
| g-b-r wrote:
| Oh yeah if encryption is broken only for browsers no big deal
| right
| Jensson wrote:
| Governments still can't see your requests to servers under
| normal circumstances with this law.
|
| The weakness is only if someone controls your internet
| connection and can use a compromised certification process to
| trick you into thinking you are at "e2e.com" when you are on
| another site, and in those cases the only difference from now
| is that your browser will display "secure" instead of
| "invalid cert". There is no other difference.
|
| So to orchestrate an attack they would need to build an
| webbapp that is sufficient similar for you not to notice,
| take over your internet connection and break the
| certification process.
| calgoo wrote:
| "The weakness is only if someone controls your internet
| connection and can use a compromised certification process
| to trick you into thinking you are at e2e.com"
|
| That will be (or already is) done at ISP level. It will
| probably be fully automated, where they just put a court
| order number into a form, and it automatically just catches
| all your traffic in gear that's installed at the ISP.
| Jensson wrote:
| It is only undetectable if the site actually uses the
| vulnerable certificates. Otherwise you can see that the
| government is spying on you since the browser tells you
| what certificate it got (Telling you what certificate was
| used is a part of eIDAS). There is no way the government
| will replace certificates like that on an automated
| basis, it is too easy for people to notice and make a big
| deal about.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| If a nonprofit like Let's Encrypt can perform automated
| certificate renewal with a few API calls, so can the
| government.
|
| Also, MITMs are a thing and getting the EIDAS certs in
| the root store will show that the certs in question are
| trusted, which is all that really matters because there
| is no way for users to know what certificates were
| actually installed by the website owner.
| Jensson wrote:
| That has nothing to do with this, I don't think you
| understand this vulnerability. You can see which
| certificate authority issued the cert, so you can see if
| the suddenly the site started using a vulnerable cert
| provider and thus know that it is compromised. Note that
| the same attack is possible right now, the only
| difference is how your browser displays it, you can just
| install a plugin to get back the original behavior if you
| want. So this in no way prevents you from secure
| browsing.
|
| TLDR: If you are worried about security you can always
| install a plugin to get back the old behavior. This just
| says that browsers should be able to trust them, not that
| you have to configure your browser to trust them.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| CA changes can happen due to many legitimate regions.
| Pinning certificates in this way doesn't scale, as we saw
| with the deprecation of HPKP.
| Jensson wrote:
| All you need is a list of trusted CA's, like we do right
| now, and then issue a warning if it isn't on that list.
| It is a very simple plugin to make.
| g-b-r wrote:
| These certificate authories _will_ also issue legitimate
| certificates btw, the regulation explicitly encourages
| local states to use them for their services
| g-b-r wrote:
| First, few people would know that they should install a
| plugin, second, since the laws says that browsers "shall
| ensure", there's a good chance that they would be forced
| to try to block these plugins
| g-b-r wrote:
| There's probably at most one person every ten millions
| who uses add-ons displaying each connection's certificate
| authority; and even them will likely not notice anything
| if it's only done to them occasionally (not to mention
| that absolutely no one checks the connections used to
| download third-party stuff, to my knowledge).
| Jensson wrote:
| Yes, because CA level attacks are basically nonexistent
| and not a very big deal since they require you to control
| the targets internet connection.
|
| The moment people learn that the US government could
| control a CA and your internet provider to spy on you
| maybe that will change. But as is people think it is too
| much work for governments to bother with it.
| g-b-r wrote:
| > Yes, because CA level attacks are basically nonexistent
| and not a very big deal.
|
| I'd call that bs, CA level attacks are very unlikely to
| be detected, so we know little about their prevalence.
|
| (you edited your comment to add... that it requires you
| to control the targets internet connection?? And "the
| moment people learn that thenUS government could control
| (a CA) and your internet provider to spy on you maybe
| that will change With tls becoming ubiquitous they're now
| indispensable
| g-b-r wrote:
| ops I guess I destroyed my comment by mistake, and I
| can't edit it anymore...
|
| It originally was
|
| * I'd call that bs, CA level attacks are very unlikely to
| be detected, so we know little about their prevalence.
|
| With tls becoming ubiquitous they're now indispensable*
| g-b-r wrote:
| > the only difference from now is that your browser will
| display "secure" instead of "invalid cert". There is no
| other difference.
|
| Oh that's SUCH as an insignificant difference!!!
|
| > So to orchestrate an attack they would need to build an
| webbapp that is sufficient similar for you not to notice,
| take over your internet connection and break the
| certification process.
|
| You can simply relay the requests to the original
| site/"webapp", no need to build one similar
| Jensson wrote:
| > You can simply relay the requests to the original
| site/"webapp", no need to build one similar
|
| Doesn't work if the app encrypts messages locally, so end
| to end encryption is still valid with this.
| g-b-r wrote:
| We're talking about normal browsing, not webapps
| performing their encryption
| isilofi wrote:
| Webapps are also vulnerable because the Javascript can be
| manipulated in a MitM attack.
|
| The only way around this would be a "real" app.
| g-b-r wrote:
| True
| isilofi wrote:
| There is no way for e2echat.com to make sure that the client
| will insist on a certain safe CA. Sure, in case e2echat.com
| controls all clients this would be possible, but this is a rare
| case.
|
| In the general case, any CA can sign any website certificate.
| So all those new government CAs can sign all the man-in-the-
| middle certificates they like, and browsers are obliged to
| accept them. Nothing the website can do about that.
|
| There are ways to pin certain CAs via DNSSEC and TLSA resource
| records in DNS. But browsers ignore those, and even if they
| didn't, the same EU proposal also specifies government DNS
| manipulation.
|
| So the gist is: EIDAS must die.
| Jensson wrote:
| You still wont be able to break the end to end encryption of
| a site. You can only intercept traffic that the server can
| read, you can't intercept traffic that are encrypted end to
| end.
|
| And if the site can see your data assume the government can
| see it as well, they can get it with a warrant.
| isilofi wrote:
| Website-based end-to-end encryption isn't usually. In most
| cases, the "e2e-encrypting" website will deliver the
| Javascript that does the "e2e-encryption", which can easily
| be manipulated to provide a copy of all messages to some
| convenient third location.
|
| A warrant will maybe warn the site and the user that
| something is going on.
|
| A man-in-the-middle attack without a warrant delivered to
| either party is more likely to go undetected.
| Jensson wrote:
| > which can easily be manipulated to provide a copy of
| all messages to some convenient third location.
|
| Updating others javascript as a proxy isn't "easily".
|
| Also if the government goes all this way to tell each
| internet provider to spy on people, why do you think they
| couldn't tell certificate authorities to spy on people?
| It is the same level. I wouldn't be surprised if many
| CA's in USA already does this.
| isilofi wrote:
| It is "easily", because current commercially available
| "firewall" appliances include that kind of capabilities.
| Just a few clicks, install a CA certificate, add a
| logging endpoint, done. Certain regulated industries like
| finance and medicine are required to use those. All chats
| are instantly intercepted and logged.
|
| And the way to spy on people via a certificate authority
| is exactly as described, you get a CA that signs your
| man-in-the-middle certificate for a website you do not
| own. Then you MitM that traffic using that certificate,
| while still getting a green "lock" icon.
|
| With current WebCA certificates, certificate transparency
| does help a little to detect such MitM certificates, and
| some CAs have actually been caught red-handed. There are
| processes to punish or remove such CAs. However, this law
| would also prevent such actions, thus making it
| impossible to prevent any future malfeasant CAs.
|
| About an example MitM certificate case and removal, see
| the DigiNotar case:
| https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2011/08/29/fraudulent-
| goog...
|
| For more about how certificate transparency works see
| http://nil.lcs.mit.edu/6.824/2020/papers/ct-faq.txt
| Jensson wrote:
| Maybe browsers shouldn't hardcode those things? If they
| let you blacklist CAs you could do that yourself or via a
| plugin. There is nothing preventing browsers from
| implementing that, and have a one click button "don't
| trust compromised CAs". Could even had that during
| install as a toggle, would satisfy every legal
| requirement.
|
| If this means users gets more power over what CAs to
| trust then that is a good thing.
| isilofi wrote:
| You can manually distrust hardcoded CAs in all common
| browsers. But even now, this is rarely used because it is
| tedious, there are roughly a hundred active CAs.
|
| And depending on how that law will be interpreted by
| courts, manually distrusting might be considered illegal.
| Jensson wrote:
| > manually distrusting might be considered illegal
|
| It is just a display change, all the law says is:
|
| "For those purposes web-browsers shall ensure that the
| identity data provided using any of the methods is
| displayed in a user friendly manner."
|
| I don't see how adding a warning icon or block icon
| instead of the lock hurts would be banned. To me it seems
| like so much here is based on baseless assumptions.
| g-b-r wrote:
| to me at this point it seems like you're trying to defend
| this law a-priori...
| isilofi wrote:
| No, manually distrusting will probably be considered
| illegal. "Browsers shall ensure", no exceptions:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38109691
|
| I would also urge you to refrain from using terminology
| such as "baseless assumptions" when your own assumptions
| are so easily refuted by directly reading the text of the
| proposal.
| mjan22640 wrote:
| I as an user decide what is user friendly to me.
| nulld3v wrote:
| > If this means users gets more power over what CAs to
| trust then that is a good thing.
|
| Do you really think your average user is going to go into
| the browser and manually distrust root CAs? We have
| learned again and again that good security is "secure by
| default", not "secure after arcane configuration".
| galadran wrote:
| https://last-chance-for-eidas.org/
| fuoqi wrote:
| If certificates issued by those CAs will be tied to independent
| (from EU) certificate transparency (CT) services and to specific
| national top-level domains, then I am completely fine with this.
| After a big number of websites in Russia (including the biggest
| bank in the country) have effectively lost access to the CA
| infrastructure used by commonly used browsers, I don't think any
| honest person can say that the current status quo is robust
| enough. So it looks like EU simply hedges against this potential
| infrastructure risk.
|
| To mitigate the MitM risk I believe that CT and limiting CA to
| specific top-level domains (so a hypothetical RU CA would not be
| able to issue certificates for .eu or .com) should be sufficient
| enough.
| eps wrote:
| Re: Russia - SberBank, which is used by the vast majority of
| population, voluntarily switched to a new Russian government-
| controlled CA. This move aimed to coerse people to install this
| CA's cert under false premises and to let the state splice
| https if needs be. The goal was bloody obvious and it has never
| been about the "robustness" of infrastructure. They just want
| to take away people's Internet privacy.
| fuoqi wrote:
| I hope you are simply not familiar with the situation and not
| FUDing around.
|
| The "false premise" was that GlobalSign has refused to issue
| new certificates for Sberbank and there were several cases of
| CAs revoking existing certificates. They eventually have
| found a CA (Harica DV) which was willing to issue new
| certificates, but it was not clear at the time that such CA
| will be found and the new certificates can be revoked at any
| moment after a new wave of sanctions or simply after a
| strongly worded warning from Washington or Brussels. Relying
| on a relatively minor Greek CA for bank operations is clearly
| not a good strategy in their situation.
| nulld3v wrote:
| Leaving a source for other readers:
| https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/russia-
| create...
| calgoo wrote:
| So what happens to open source browsers? Will they be forced to
| implement it? Are the governments going to audit the code to make
| sure no one is releasing a version that has removed the
| government certs or are they going to outlaw open source
| browsers?
|
| Again, this is not going to catch anyone with half a braincell
| that is trying to do something. This is just going to catch
| everyone else.
|
| I wonder if this will tie into the BS that Google was trying to
| implement that would make it impossible to modify the webpage
| using adblockers etc. making it so you can't navigate the web if
| you are using a uncertified browser.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| > I wonder if this will tie into the BS that Google was trying
| to implement that would make it impossible to modify the
| webpage using adblocker
|
| Very likely, yes. Also note that a similar client-side CSAM
| scanning feature was rolled out by Apple with a similar
| anticipation, and shortly after we saw the proposal of
| Chatcontrol and the like.
|
| > So what happens to open source browsers?
|
| See my other comment on the same thread[1].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38110667
| matthews2 wrote:
| How will this be enforced? If Mozilla or Google added some hard
| coded certificate into a new browser version, what if a
| distribution like Debian patched it out? Or if a user can delete
| it from the certificate stores themselves?
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| People get very hung up on what people can technically do, but
| the domains of the browser or OS that doesn't follow these
| rules will simply be blocked at the DNS level so that you can't
| download them any more. The relevant entities such as companies
| developing or using said non-compliant projects will be fined,
| and any natural persons jailed outright, a la Stallman's The
| Right To Read.
| execveat wrote:
| You can't block a browser at the DNS level.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| I meant domains offering downloads of the non-compliant
| browser/OS; updated. Thanks!
| subbz wrote:
| Unfortunately the whole world population is addicted to ~5
| sites/apps on the web who will play the game.
|
| If Debian patches this out, you won't be able to access those
| sites. That's a living edge case for them.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| I think the right way of dealing with this is to have a
| button to switch between _secure mode_ and _insecure
| /government mode_.
| g-b-r wrote:
| the law can be interpreted as making it illegal, even for end
| users (it deals with "web-browsers", not "web browser vendors")
| verisimi wrote:
| Lololol
|
| "We need to be able to break security so we can see all your
| data, to keep you safe! Terrorists! Child abuse!"
|
| "hmm yeah, but who's going to keep me safe from you?"
| galadran wrote:
| Title should probably be: "Last Chance to fix eIDAS: Secret EU
| law threatens Internet security"
| Maxion wrote:
| The Secret Law bit is quite clickbaity.
| runnedrun wrote:
| Does anyone know what the supposed benefits are for this kind of
| bill? Are proponents overtly advocating for increased
| surveillance ability?
| g_p wrote:
| I believe that the stated/claimed intent is to create cross-
| country, bloc-wide digital signature interoperability and
| acceptance standards. The theory being that you can "digitally
| sign" things with a national ID (e.g. a smart card), and have
| that recognised anywhere in the EU. That would, in theory, help
| to reduce and simplify bureaucracy, especially for people
| moving between countries in the EU (a process which can be
| quite complex even with freedom of movement, due to totally
| different cultural norms around government systems, forms,
| languages, etc.)
|
| Something better than typing your name and trusting a third
| party to do email verification for a digital signature
| certainly sounds like it could have advantages for doing
| business though.
|
| I believe the issues identified here seem to stem from a (very)
| over-enthusiastic desire to have certificate acceptance
| everywhere (i.e. prevent discriminating against one country's
| citizens by excluding their ID card CA), without understanding
| the different types of trust chains and certificate chains.
| Presumably scattered with a bit of technical naivety as well.
| The concept itself is (probably?) fine, as long as it doesn't
| try to force browsers or SSL verifiers to accept or trust
| certificates they don't want to.
| jruohonen wrote:
| Indeed: the goals are justifiable and very much welcome, in
| my opinion. Yet, I do not understand what CAs and the global
| TLS/PKI ecosystem have to do with the goals.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Yet, I do not understand what CAs and the global TLS/PKI
| ecosystem have to do with the goals.
|
| Technically that is also digital signing. The regulators
| probably thought that all kinds of digital signing should
| be included in this bill and just slapped something down
| for browsers while they were at it.
| g_p wrote:
| My guess is that someone saw the value (rightly) in being
| able to do "good" digital signatures on the web (better
| than docusign in terms of integrity/proof), and that
| meant (in their head) those certificates have to work in
| the web browser.
|
| Which, if you don't understand web trust and PKI, means a
| bit of searching online will tell you that you need your
| browser to trust the CAs you use for digital signatures.
|
| Which is of course not true - you can (and should)
| present an "untrusted" (i.e. not a server authentication)
| certificate as your client certificate or for signatures,
| as there's different trust bits and use-cases for
| different kinds of certificates.
| isilofi wrote:
| I suppose this is the first step towards a stricter kind of the
| German "Impressumspflicht". Currently, if you are operating a
| website in any kind of (even most remotely) commercial
| function, you need an imprint. Lacking one, you get nasty
| expensive letters from lawyers and courts. At the moment, this
| imprint is just a text on your website.
|
| With certificates from a government CA containing your name,
| address and maybe other data like tax ID, the certificate
| becomes that imprint, digitally signed and hard to fake. So I
| guess the next step after this directive is in place will be to
| require such government certificates for all European websites
| instead of the usual domain-validated WebCA ones. For a modest
| fee going into the pockets of some government cronies, of
| course.
| hannob wrote:
| A key idea behind all of this is to sell "qualified
| certificates". Which is another way of saying "expensive
| certificates".
|
| In the past, CAs sold EV certificates which gave you a nice
| green look in the browser bar and no security advantage
| (arguably security downsides, because you cannot automate it).
| That was good business, until browsers decided that this makes
| no sense and scraped any special treatment for EV certificates.
|
| The "qualified certificates" by the EU are essentially EV with
| a new name.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Scott Helme had a similar take back in 2022[1].
|
| [1] https://scotthelme.co.uk/looks-like-a-duck-swims-like-a-
| duck...
| johnfonesca wrote:
| >Which is another way of saying "expensive certificates".
|
| True, basically eIDAS is a cartel. With the help of EU
| legislation, some Certification Authorities banded together
| and are now saying that certificates emited by anyone but
| them are not good. And obviously they fully controll the
| pricing for the "good" certificates.
| sofixa wrote:
| > True, basically eIDAS is a cartel. With the help of EU
| legislation, some Certification Authorities banded together
| and are now saying that certificates emited by anyone but
| them are not good
|
| For very specific needs like electronic signatures, "seals"
| and an interesting one I hadn't heard before, timestamping
| (proving that an electronic document has existed at that
| timestamp), not for general computing.
|
| Also, considering _Bulgaria_ has 5 CAs on the official
| list, with 2 others as potential, the claims of a shady
| cartel of "big Cert" being behind this is laughable.
| throw_a_grenade wrote:
| EU bureaucrats are annoyed that ~100% of the trust decisions
| are made outside the EU (given that majority of browsers and
| the trust stores like Microsoft, Android, Java etc., are
| operated from US). They see it as the issue about the third
| part of security triade of confidentiality, integrity and
| availability. In short, they fear that EU company can
| theoretically be put out of business on a whim of US entity
| which is unaccountable to EU poeple (by revoking the cert in
| case of e-commerce, or trust bits in case of CA, or "TSP" as
| it's called in eIDAS). Hence the prohibition from distrusting
| certs unless ETSI (which is accountable to EU people) agrees.
|
| Most of the commenters here miss the point, because they
| concentrate on confidentiality and integrity (cf. any post
| about MITM). They are of course correct that this creates
| capability to intercept TLS connections. They still miss the
| point that EU bureaucrats see it as reasonable tradeoff (which
| I don't think it is, but that's their POV).
| rvz wrote:
| Thank you EU! We absolutely need more surveillance! Been waiting
| for months [0] for more government control over everything! /s
|
| Really can't wait for more of this! I <3 the EU! /s
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36934200
| miohtama wrote:
| Chat control has intercepted this forum post and flagged you as
| a terrorist.
|
| Your bank account is now frozen.
|
| Please report at your local police station tomorrow at 10am.
| sirwitti wrote:
| I'd like to see what the european court of justice will have to
| say about this, should this actually become law.
| mbwgh wrote:
| The following quote from former Jean-Claude Juncker, president of
| the European Commission sums up the way the EU seems to work
| quite nicely:
|
| "We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see
| what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people
| don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step
| until there is no turning back."[0]
|
| [0] - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Juncker
| graemep wrote:
| Wow, a lot of those quotes are damning.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Doubt it is a particularly unbiased sample though, so
| probably not a good idea to draw any strong conclusions from
| reading it.
| belter wrote:
| "it is a historic mistake to not want to tax at the
| appropriate levels the profits of multinational companies
| which act globally and don't pay the taxes they owe."
| - Jean-Claude Juncker ...Prime minister of ....Luxembourg
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Mr LuxLeaks said that eh?
|
| I mean, I'm not saying Juncker is great, just that
| reading the random collection of quotes on wikiquotes
| might not be the best way to judge his work.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| The worst part is that this is still better than how most
| governments currently work. At least there is a chance to give
| feedback.
|
| Also, keep in mind that this is in the context of getting all
| member states of the EU to agree on something. People kicking
| up a fuss _is the default situation_ because of conflicting
| interests between different states.
|
| Make no mistake about how I feel about this though: it's still
| pretty horrible even with that context in mind. And as graemep
| pointed out the rest of the quotes on that page will tell you
| all you need to know about Juncker too.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| I think the worst part is, that most governments work like
| this, but only some can dare to speak about it in the open.
| Now why could Juncker speak so open? Probably because he is
| quite disconnected from the democratic election process ..
|
| I mean, I certainly did not vote for Ursula von der Leyen
| either.
| p_l wrote:
| Your representatives that you voted into parliament did,
| however.
| laszlokorte wrote:
| The ,,same opinion as" operator does not distribute over
| the transitive equality relation
| softg wrote:
| She was nominated by the European Council (=Heads of
| gov't of EU countries) because the EU parliament is a
| divided mess and the leading parties have no internal
| cohesion whatsoever. Parties at the european level are
| disparate coalitions between national parties and MEPs
| follow the national party line. The decision was made by
| national governments and rubber-stamped by the
| parliament.
|
| This is fundamentally different from how a PM is voted in
| a traditional parliamentary system where an MP leads the
| party during the election process and elected as PM after
| a clear victory or negotiations between MPs.
| munk-a wrote:
| Having a prominent MP leader like that is one of my
| second least favorite part of parliamentary
| governments[1]. Politics and governance aren't so simple
| that one person will ever be found that fairly represents
| the majority of the populace because the majority of the
| populace can't agree on multiple things. It's better for
| the majority of the power in governments to be devolved
| down to MPs voting on matters with the executive branch
| just being a formality for PR on the local and
| international stage - as well as being entrusted with
| emergency powers if we ever need to get anything done.
|
| We're a people with a wide spectrum of beliefs - we
| should be represented by a wide spectrum of MPs... never
| by a single voice.
|
| 1. My first being whenever a single party actually wins a
| majority.
| softg wrote:
| > We're a people with a wide spectrum of beliefs - we
| should be represented by a wide spectrum of MPs... never
| by a single voice.
|
| This is a fair statement. I'm not from the EU but I think
| it's true for basically any society. Also a lot of the
| dysfunction in the EU is obviously by design and it's
| supposed to instill cooperation and deliberation between
| different stakeholders.
|
| Still, in politics "getting things done" is very
| important, imo much more important than representation
| because the main job of a government is to govern and a
| fairly balanced government that fails to govern will lose
| support very quickly and become unrepresentative/useless.
| Also if someone can't get things done, others will do it
| and force their hand, like the case of the election of
| the EU commission president. Or practically everything
| the UN does.
|
| The good thing about a government by a single party or a
| well defined coalition is that you know what they roughly
| stand for, what they don't stand for, who is for them and
| who is against. You can support them or vote against
| them. In an election one side wins. Being an incumbent is
| difficult so in the next the other side wins, they are
| supposed to balance each other that way.
|
| What is the alternative of a de facto coalition between
| the right, center-left and liberals? Which of these is
| really in power? Who are you going to vote for if you
| don't like where the things are headed?
|
| Looking at the EU parliament (or the parliaments of many
| EU countries) the main alternatives are fascism-lite and
| actual fascism. That's the risk of plethoric
| supranational governing bodies like the EU or very large
| coalition governments, they rob people of viable
| democratic alternatives.
| soco wrote:
| I think you pointed the defining aspect here. Having many
| opinions is inefficient but representative. Having one
| winner is efficient but lopsided. You can't have the cake
| and eat it, so each society had to decide which way (and
| revisit the decision over time).
| bboygravity wrote:
| Which is relevant to his/her point (about not being able
| to vote on people directly), because?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| How would you know, who I voted for?
| lakomen wrote:
| Von der Leyen is President of the European Council. The
| parliament had nothing to do with it.
|
| The council is made up of the prime ministers of the EU
| member countries, which also were not voted for seats in
| the EC.
|
| Likewise there was no vote on the Lisboa treaty which
| effectively put the EC above the parliament and outside
| its jurisdiction.
| almostnormal wrote:
| > People kicking up a fuss is the default situation because
| of conflicting interests between different states.
|
| In some cases less between the states and more between
| gonvernment and people. The european parliament is elected by
| the people. But many important matters are defined by the
| comission consisting of representatives of the member states
| governments.
|
| Of course the different governments are also elected. But as
| part of the comission they can act against the will of the
| people and later blame the EU.
| franky47 wrote:
| But the plans were on display..." "On display? I
| eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
| "That's the display department." "With a flashlight."
| "Ah, well, the lights had probably gone." "So had the
| stairs." "But look, you found the notice, didn't you?"
| "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom
| of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a
| sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.
|
| Douglas Adams wasn't far off.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| The interesting part with the EU is that all policy (proposed
| and accepted) is actually all organized, findable and out in
| the open on the internet (and even translated to all official
| member state languages IIRC)... if you have the mindset of a
| bureaucrat and know the system.
|
| I know because my ex did European Studies and knew how to
| navigate those websites. I for the life of me cannot figure
| out how she did it if I try now.
| arp242 wrote:
| EU website makes the IBM and HP websites seem user-friendly
| and easy. I tried engaging with some of the Open Source
| stuff a few years ago, and I definitely felt like I needed
| a "European Studies" PhD to be able to navigate all of
| that.
| orwin wrote:
| A really good friend of mine created the first version of
| eur-lex.europa (hopefully it's that one, it was a website
| for lawyers to find European legislation and case law),
| he barely finished his first internship at the time, only
| had one true web project on his belt (and two weeks of
| intensive formation), and was spectacularly underpaid
| (not for his inexistant qualifications, but for the work
| he did).
|
| I thought he did a good work, but I was a student too so
| maybe I was just impressed with basic stuff (highly
| likely).
| vanderZwan wrote:
| TBF, when my former partner explained the system to me,
| it did feel like a lot of the complexity was inherent to
| the problem of what the EU as a project is trying to
| achieve. It is not a trivial problem to solve.
|
| Another issue is basically the legal analogy of how
| certain difficult programming languages impose a
| selection bias on who actually is willing to learn it,
| which then leads to an echo-chamber culture where most
| people underestimate the issues with the programming
| language.
| TiredGuy wrote:
| Sounds like it might be a good web-scraping project for a
| civic-minded group or individual: scrape the sites, unify
| and organize them into something more approachable and
| discoverable.
|
| I know in the US we have orgs like Code for America and
| events like National Day of Civic Hacking. Does the EU have
| similar groups and events? I wonder if this could be
| presented to something like that.
| janejeon wrote:
| As someone else said, sounds like an interesting project to
| scrape, organize, and somehow "re-surface" that data in a
| much more accessible manner (how? I don't know; I've never
| done such a project before).
|
| Obviously it should be said that such a project shouldn't
| be needed in the first place in an ideal world, but it does
| sound like something I might be interested in chipping in
| regardless (and a great learning opportunity).
| hunter2_ wrote:
| I am the last person to suggest throwing AI at a random
| problem, but this actually sounds like a good match for
| LLM training/prompting...
| qingcharles wrote:
| It's sad, but this actually happened.
|
| There was an episode of the Mark Thomas Comedy Product where
| he describes how they were trying to find the spending habits
| of EU MPs, but they were in a basement with no electronic
| devices allowed, so they hired an army of students to run up
| and down with notebooks and pens and relay all the
| information to more students upstairs who had to type it all
| up and put it online.
| belter wrote:
| "When it becomes serious, you have to lie'" -
| Jean-Claude Juncker
| galadran wrote:
| https://eidas-open-letter.org
|
| The open letter signed by 300+ researchers, professors and
| experts.
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| The proposal is so obscene that I doubt Apple, Google or even
| Microsoft would ever comply with it.
| neodypsis wrote:
| I guess Europe would have to fund its own browser development.
| The rest of the world won't participate.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Developing a browser these days mostly involves slapping on
| their own branding over Firefox or Chromium though, so hardly
| the end of the world for EU.
| datpiff wrote:
| It's a market of nearly half a billion people, two-tier
| browsers seem more likely. IIRC Netscape did this in the past
| over US export laws on cryptography.
| justinclift wrote:
| They'd probably be fined into submission if they don't though.
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| If it gets to that point, one alternative would be creating
| some ad-hoc non profits that are on paper not controlled by
| them (but in practice they are) and then giving up the
| control of their respective browsers to said non-profits.
|
| But it won't get to that point. I don't really think the US
| government would be ok with a regulation like this, either,
| and they have even more bargaining power than tech companies.
| g-b-r wrote:
| then the non-profits would be breaking the law
| uxp8u61q wrote:
| You think the EU's lawyers will be fooled by a scheme you
| cooked up in an HN comment?
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Very concerning. As a slight aside though, it is not a "secret
| law". All EU laws are published on its website in every official
| language, and the vast majority of laws (including this one) must
| be publicly ratified by the directly elected European Parliament
| before coming effective.
|
| They should tone down this kind of sensationalist clickbait that
| I would expect to find in UK tabloids. They probably think it
| helps them impress the urgency of the matter on the public but
| frankly it just makes me doubt the veracity of the claims made in
| the article (though in this case I trust Mozilla and would hope
| that they are not misrepresenting the content of the law itself).
| ratg13 wrote:
| They've had entire programs around trying to get the public
| engaged in this topic.
|
| I've watched many of their YouTube presentations.. all with
| less than 100 views when I watched them, despite them being
| uploaded for some time.
| peyton wrote:
| Why can't Mozilla publish the agreed-upon changes? Are the
| drafts currently classified? If so, I think it's okay to bell
| ring.
| phasmantistes wrote:
| I don't think "classified" is the right word, but they
| haven't been published. They were leaked to various third
| parties, who got them to Mozilla / EFF / the other folks
| writing letters of protest today. Those parties haven't
| published the full text themselves, to protect the identity
| of the leaker.
| sofixa wrote:
| Also, this:
|
| > and will be presented to the public and parliament for a
| rubber stamp before the end of the year
|
| That's not how the EU parliament works, they're not just a
| rubber stamp. The topic is sufficiently grave without the need
| for clickbait and painfully obvious exaggerations.
| galadran wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_trilogue_meeting
| Vinnl wrote:
| As I understand it, the EU Parliament engages through the
| trilogues. Once agreement has been reached there, final
| approval is indeed more of a rubberstamp. (But: I'm just
| somewhat interested in the subject; I'm not an expert on the
| process.)
| sofixa wrote:
| Once an agreement has been reached, the Parliament can
| still reject the proposed law (which can easily happen
| because a conciliatory committee does not represent all the
| factions in parliament and of course public
| outcry/petitions can change opinions).
| galadran wrote:
| "Agreed behind closed doors" would probably be better than
| "Secret Law" but I guess its a question of brevity.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| For anyone who's about to say that surveillance isn't the point
| of this legislation: it definitely is; we very recently saw
| Germany trying to MITM jabber.ru users[1], having a CA that can
| be asked to issue any certificate is definitely something that'd
| be used for surveillance purposes.
|
| [1] https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/
| Jensson wrote:
| eIDAS exists since there are many conflicting standards for
| electronic certificates. eIDAS is an effort to unify those
| standards. Maybe the clause where they say browsers has to add
| specific CA's is for spying, but eIDAS in general isn't to help
| spying its just there to help unify all the different
| electronic certificate services in EU.
|
| For example banking, signing official documents like grades
| from school etc, all of those usecases are a part of eIDAS.
| That is the core of the standard and there you really want to
| see all the certificate information to be sure it is the right
| origin, since unlike browsers there is no list of trusted CAs,
| you just see that some organization accepted it.
|
| Edit: Browsers already had their own standard that they think
| is better than eIDAS, so they don't want this to apply to them.
| But Occam's razor says that EU just added "and browsers should
| also do this" instead of there being some conspiracy behind it,
| it was simple to just add everything instead of leaving just
| browsers out.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| > Browsers already had their own standard that they think is
| better than eIDAS
|
| Unlike the Browser/CA forum rules which are security focused,
| EIDAS comes from a government mandate first and foremost, so
| the concern isn't entirely subjective as you suggest.
|
| > "and browsers should also do this" instead of there being
| some conspiracy behind it
|
| The law isn't RFC 2119 where there is a distinction between
| SHOULD and MUST: the law is all about what an entity MUST do,
| so bringing up "should" in this context isn't helping the
| point you're typing to make.
| Jensson wrote:
| I don't get what your point is here, you said this and that
| is what I argued against, your points here does nothing to
| defend this: "For anyone who's about to say that
| surveillance isn't the point of this legislation".
|
| > Unlike the Browser/CA forum rules which are security
| focused, EIDAS comes from a government mandate first and
| foremost, so the concern isn't entirely subjective as you
| suggest.
|
| I didn't say this was subjective. My argument was that it
| is easy to see why EU would do this without having
| surveillance in mind. They just wanted all certificates to
| follow the same standard, the main part of these standards
| were document signing and they thought web sites are
| documents so we add them as well to the standard.
|
| > so bringing up "should" in this context isn't helping the
| point you're typing to make.
|
| I didn't make a distinction between should and must there,
| that wasn't my point at all. What was hard to understand
| there? This bill is first and foremost about document
| signing, and then they added a clause that it also applies
| to browsers. That is the main part of my argument.
|
| A bill that first and foremost targets document signing
| doesn't seem like it was obviously made to add spying on
| browsers, if that is what they wanted they would have
| labeled it "web protection bill" or something like they did
| with the chat one, they aren't afraid of saying it is about
| spying when that is what they want.
| miohtama wrote:
| More healthier approach for the EU to get e.g. the
| document signing to a single standard would be
|
| - Make sure there is an open standard (is there?)
|
| - Fund and promote its open source development
|
| - Have an industry lobbyist non-profit to onboard
| individual businesses
|
| If the goal is to "promote standards" the way this is
| being done does not seem to be aligned the 50 years of
| software industry standard development, with the examples
| like TCP/IP, PNG, AV1 and so on.
| ngrilly wrote:
| > eIDAS exists since there are many conflicting standards for
| electronic certificates. eIDAS is an effort to unify those
| standards.
|
| Did we need laws to "unify" all the standards we successfully
| use today, like IP, UDP, TCP, HTTP, TLS, Certificate
| Transparency, HTML, ECMAScript, CSS, DNS, DMARC, DKIM, SSH,
| etc.? Laws are not the right tool for this. And law makers
| don't have the necessary expertise.
| sshine wrote:
| It's either laws or market forces, both have drawbacks.
|
| While eIDAS seems like a great idea to coerce member states
| into adopting a common standard, it just also happens to
| sneak EU-centralist ideology in, and total digital
| surveillance is the 0th application of that ideology.
|
| The big catch with EU is: once you opt in, opting out is
| very difficult.
| troupo wrote:
| There are also great many standards we use today that were
| unified and enforced through laws.
|
| Open any law on produce, construction, cars, industrial
| equipment (and a million others), and you'll find thousands
| of specs and standards mandated by law, and for a reason.
| Serenacula wrote:
| I think ECMAScript my actually be a counter example, no?
| Isn't that also governed and funded by the European
| council?
| smarnach wrote:
| There definitely isn't a law mandating Javascript engines
| to follow the Ecmascript standard, which would be the
| equivalent of what's happening here.
| logifail wrote:
| > signing official documents like grades from school
|
| I have no Earthly idea why a) this needs to be done
| digitally, or b) for the EU to be involved (at EU level) with
| this.
|
| Unfortunately if you pitch mission creep vs the principle of
| subsidiarity, the former wins every time.
| willeh wrote:
| University grades are standardised already. This is useful
| because it allows people to work in other countries,
| digitally signing them prevents fraud.
|
| This is just one use case for eIDAS, then you have things
| like interacting with different government institutions,
| banks, et cetera, et cetera.
|
| There are a lot of people who live in/work/visit other EU
| countries as is their near absolute right. We should
| therefore standardise technology on the EU level to make
| their lives easier.
| nulld3v wrote:
| Great, very good! Now if you want to standardize
| encrypted communication, please do it with the help of
| security researchers, not like this.
| willeh wrote:
| Other than this questionable browser CA thing, do you
| think there are any specific flaws with the crypto system
| presented in eIDAS.
| nulld3v wrote:
| Alright, so I am not a security researcher so actual
| security researchers may not share my views. Also, as
| mentioned in the site, the full text of the new
| regulation is not public yet. And finally, I have only
| skimmed whatever text is available given that it's over
| 100 pages and I skipped over most of the EDIW stuff (it's
| a really complex system that I can't understand/audit in
| 20 mins).
|
| But with that out of the way, no I don't have any other
| complaints, I think the regulation is generally a move in
| the right direction.
| logifail wrote:
| > University grades are standardised already
|
| ... for some value of "standardised"?
|
| UK[0]: First, 2:1, 2:2, Third
|
| Germany[1]: 1 to 5
|
| France[2]: "on a scale from 0-20"
|
| <chuckle>
|
| [0] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/students/success-
| guide/ug/assessm... [1] https://www.uni-
| passau.de/en/international/coming-to-passau/... [2]
| https://u-paris.fr/en/higher-education-in-france/
| fuoqi wrote:
| A proper solution for MitM is mandatory independent certificate
| transparency, not outright denial of national CAs support in
| browsers. A German National CA should not be able to issue
| certificates for .ru in the first place and having a clear
| record of misbehavior in CT is probably not something operators
| of such CA would like to have even when pressured by
| intelligence agencies.
|
| Browsers should get their shit together and add proper support
| of domain-limited CAs and add optional whitelisting of CAs for
| given websites.
| agwa wrote:
| > Browsers should get their shit together and add proper
| support of domain-limited CAs
|
| They do in fact support this - e.g. Mozilla trusts KamuSM
| only for .tr [1], Chrome limited ANSSI to French TLDs [2].
|
| However, there is no indication that the EU would be willing
| to accept such constraints on their national CAs. If you look
| at several of the current national European CAs, they
| routinely issue for generic TLDs like .com.
|
| [1] https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-security-
| polic...
|
| [2] https://security.googleblog.com/2013/12/further-
| improving-di...
| lambdaone wrote:
| Cool. Domain-limited CAs are a really good idea, and they
| don't need anything like dynamic downloading of CAA
| records.
| smarnach wrote:
| CAA records only apply at the time a certificate is
| issued, and they only need to be considered by CAs. If
| the CAA record is changed later, all certificates that
| have already been issued continue to be valid, even if
| the new CAA record does not allow the issuing CA anymore.
| So looking at CAA records would be useless for browsers
| anyway.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Browsers do have this, although this measure is only
| selectively applied for certain CAs where misissuance has
| been an issue (There was a Indian CA for which this was used,
| need to look around MDSP for the link. I'll post it shortly.)
| agwa wrote:
| Historically, root constraints were only used in response
| to misissuance, but more recently, KamuSM voluntarily
| limited themselves to .tr when they applied.
| fweimer wrote:
| But it doesn't enable covert surveillance. Even without
| Certificate Transparency, the change in server certificate is
| visible to the client. Initiatives like Let's Encrypt could
| make it visible to server operators, too. The browser UI will
| present those new qualified certificates and existing
| certificates differently anyway, so I'm not sure if this is
| going to work.
|
| The bigger issue is that for this in order to work at all, the
| regulation must have provisions for issuing fake assertions of
| existing identities to law enforcement and other security
| services. The predecessor didn't seem to have that. This is
| different from providing fake identification documents for
| undercover operations because as far as I understand it, those
| use are usually mostly made-up and do not impersonate another
| person.
|
| We would have to read the actual text of the proposed
| regulation to know the details, but both sides (legislators and
| those fueling the outrage machine) do not really want us to
| form our own opinion and hide the draft text from us.
| phasmantistes wrote:
| Unfortunately this isn't how it works in practice.
|
| Changes to server certificates happen all the time -- every
| 60 days or so, if you're getting certs from Let's Encrypt.
| Browsers can't tell their users every time a certificate
| changes because the users will just get notification-
| blindness and be trained to click past the warnings.
|
| Let's Encrypt doesn't help server operators see this; I
| really not sure what you mean by that. Certificate
| Transparency would help server operators see this, but the
| new law text _forbids browsers from requiring CT for these
| certs_!
|
| The law doesn't have to solve the problem of how security
| services will assert fake identities. Each member state can
| solve that internally. Allegedly, given the recent report of
| a hijack against jabber.ru and xmpp.ru, they already have.
| The problem is that, when they do, no one else has any
| recourse. No other member state can say "hey, don't hijack my
| websites!", no citizen can say "hey, don't hijack my
| traffic!", and no browser can say "hey, you issued a false
| certificate, we don't trust you anymore!".
|
| Fundamentally, the whole issue with eIDAS comes down to one
| thing: you cannot _mandate_ trust. By definition. If it 's
| mandated, it isn't trust, it's something else. By mandating
| that browsers "trust" certain CAs, they're breaking the
| entire trust model of the internet.
| varispeed wrote:
| Seems like some politicians from EU commission had parents in
| Stasi, KGB and other organisations and became allured by the
| stories of watching other people, learning they secrets or
| perhaps even seeing their naked photographs.
|
| So these pervs now want to do the same. For what?
| johnfonesca wrote:
| eIDAS is a cartel created to protect the business interests of EU
| biggest certification authorities.
| Jensson wrote:
| It is a digital certificate standard. Browser certificates is
| only a tiny part of it, that wasn't why it was made. Having a
| standard for digital certificates is a good thing, it makes it
| easy to switch document signer provider etc since they all are
| forced to implement the same interface.
| johnfonesca wrote:
| >it makes it easy to switch document signer provider etc
| since they all are forced to implement the same interface.
|
| eIDAS was introduced in 2016. Now 7 years later there still
| isn't a API specification for interoperability (there are
| drawings though https://blog.eid.as/new-apis-for-the-eidas-
| ecosystem/ )
|
| In the meantime, any digital signature done in EU must be
| done with a certificate issued only by the "select" CA to be
| considered "valid".
| Jensson wrote:
| > Now 7 years later there still isn't a API specification
| for interoperability
|
| The standard existed 2016, I did a short stint for a
| company that was implemented eIDAS back then.
|
| They even have a test suite you can use to check how well
| you comply with the standard: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-
| building-blocks/wikis/display/D...
|
| It is very archaic to work with though, but at least they
| try to have a standard.
| johnfonesca wrote:
| The ETSI checker you have linked doesn't have anything to
| do with CA API interoperability and "switch document
| signer provider". That's just a basic tool which
| validates if a signature is PADES/ETSI compliant or not.
|
| The real value in eIDAS would be "unlocked" if they would
| release a proper API specification with which a digital
| signatures application would integrate with any EIDAS CA
| to emit/sign certificates. And then enforce that any
| eIDAS compliant CA would implement this API.
|
| In practice that means any company/digital signatures
| product could do a integration with this API once and
| then be able to use ANY certification authority they
| want/need/offer best prices for certificates.
|
| Without this API, eIDAS is just a marketing moniker
| because the power belongs to the selected Certification
| Authorities. They set the prices, they choose WHOM can
| integrate with them to isse certificates and there is NO
| interoperability between them. This doesnt allow for a
| open market and makes the top players control everything
| while shouting "standards" and "eIDAS".....
| bux93 wrote:
| >In the meantime, any digital signature done in EU must be
| done with a certificate issued only by the "select" CA to
| be considered "valid".
|
| article 25 of EIDAS 1. An electronic signature shall not be
| denied legal effect and admissibility as evidence in legal
| proceedings solely on the grounds that it is in an
| electronic form or that it does not meet the requirements
| for qualified electronic signatures.
| account42 wrote:
| Why is that website using a domainhack (with a non-EU
| ccTLD) rather than a proper .eu domain? Doesn't exactly
| inspire confidence that these people should have anything
| to do with security standards.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| I've read enough mozilla.dev.security.policy threads along
| the lines of "but we're a qualified eIDAS CA (erm, TSP)! --
| but your audits, key management, and issuance controls are
| all crap! -- but eIDAS!" that I feel that it might, in fact,
| be partly an attempt by CAs to ensure that they can't be
| kicked out of browsers at the browsers' discretion, or even
| have to obey CA/BF decisions. It certainly appeared that the
| fuss around QWACs got much louder as the EV UI downgrade
| progressed.
|
| Maybe it wasn't the original intention, but right now, even
| ignoring the surveillance angle, I feel that it would be a
| major downgrade to the post-Symantec state of the Web PKI. In
| particular, the process for getting a CA _dis_ qualified or
| inconvenienced in any other way seems to be so onerous as to
| be basically intractable, especially if you, the relying
| party, are not in the EU. As far as I can tell (but here I
| can be wrong), as a relying party you don't even have
| standing to do anything about it--it's considered to be
| solely the business of your country's government, and if the
| government body doesn't care (see: Facebook and the Irish
| DPA), tough, guess you're a single-issue voter now.
| g-b-r wrote:
| what's discussed here has nothing to do with the digital
| signatures part (which by and large already existed in the
| original version)
| algesten wrote:
| To protect myself or my company, what about a pihole (or similar)
| that rejects any TLS connection attempted with certs signed by
| these root CA?
| Snawoot wrote:
| TLS 1.3 encrypts server certificate, so it will not be possible
| to filter such connections out using just passive inspection.
| archi42 wrote:
| That's illegal then. But the pihole won't do the trick, you
| need to remove the mandated certs from your browsers certstore.
| If these certs are used for legitimate places (e.g. EU or state
| websites, and I'll bet they will) you then will get a
| certificate error.
|
| Of course there is still HSTS, but that's not supported by all
| tech using TLS.
| hn8305823 wrote:
| > If these certs are used for legitimate places (e.g. EU or
| state websites, and I'll bet they will) you then will get a
| certificate error.
|
| Prediction: If this passes, users having to bypass cert
| errors will be the new cookie popup.
| bjornsing wrote:
| I'm so tired of this shitstorm of crap EU regulation. Death by a
| thousand cuts...
| agarsev wrote:
| Just adding a perspective (not necessarily mine, I'm still on the
| fence) supporting this legislation from a tech-literate person in
| the EU.
|
| The digital administration in my country has made my life so much
| easier. We all have mandatory ID cards since decades ago, but now
| they have a chip with some certs for auth, signing, etc. I can
| check my taxes, fill government forms, see any traffic tickets,
| sign official documents from my home thanks to this. However, as
| far as I understand, this relies on my user agent accepting some
| particular CAs. This is critical, to the point of my browser
| preventing me access to some parts of the administration if the
| CA is not up to date or recognised or whatever.
|
| What this legislation proposes, if I understand it correctly, is
| putting in the hands of the government the power to administer
| (part of) this CA infrastructure. As with many EU-related
| legislation, this forcefully transfers power from private (often
| American) entities to EU governments. I guess when trust in your
| government is higher or equal to trust on private firms, this
| doesn't sound so bad.
|
| Not saying this is right or wrong, but maybe this helps
| understand why many people in the EU may not be so against this
| type of legislation.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| This isn't adding a few CAs s your browser trusts the tax
| website. This appears to be replacing all of them so the eu can
| see the contents of all traffic that is proxied in and out of
| the country. None of that seems likely to work for actual bad
| people.
| kreetx wrote:
| If the root CA is installed in my browser then the government
| can MITM any connection at will.
| whelp_24 wrote:
| You should read the letter, it's worse than that. It makes
| these gov CA's unrejectable, along with providing a means of
| tracking your activity. Essentially, it's like giving your
| least trusted eu country access to your browsing history and
| some of your decrypted traffic.
|
| They could have reduced scope, but looking at effects perhaps
| that's not what they actual want.
| stinos wrote:
| _It makes these gov CA 's unrejectable_
|
| That part I understood
|
| _along with providing a means of tracking your activity.
| Essentially, it 's like giving your least trusted eu country
| access to your browsing history and some of your decrypted
| traffic._
|
| This one though, not quite. Can you explain in layman terms,
| maybe by means of a practical example, how this would work
| exactly and what is needed for it?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| You are sending letters to your friend and getting their
| replies back in the mail.
|
| You know your government delivers your letters and they
| could open them and read them, but you trust your
| government to keep your info private and use this power
| well.
|
| The current regulation would mean any government can peek
| at your letters, and even if they got caught peeking or
| letting their friends read your letters, your mail carrier
| can't do anything. They aren't even allowed to ban the
| other governments friend from reading your mail.
|
| If you had a friend who tried to help you write in secret
| code to avoid these other governments or strangers from
| reading your mail, they would be risking jail time.
|
| Not only do you have to trust your government, but you must
| trust every government in the EU and if they get caught
| misbehaving, nobody can do anything about it.
|
| (Practically, any government can MITM any ssl connection
| and read or alter things at will.)
| repelsteeltje wrote:
| > Not saying this is right or wrong, but maybe this helps
| understand why many people in the EU may not be so against this
| type of legislation.
|
| I'm with you. I think most of the fuzz is about _forcefully_
| involving government into the CA infrastructure and the fact
| that this affects rest of the world.
|
| As to the latter, I've always found it weird that by default
| all root stores contain _hundreds_ of CAs from over the world.
| By default, _anyone_ is assumed to trust large companies
| (Google, Amazon) equally as nation states (Staat der
| Nerderlanden) shady entities (Hongkong Post office). So it 's
| not surprising to have everyone up in arms if the EU adds yet
| another chair to this table.
|
| Wouldn't it make much more sense if users took more control and
| responsibility of the certs in their root store? Wouldn't it
| make more sense to restrict CAs to certain domains? I would be
| okay with a EU sanctioned CA if it could only assert
| authenticity of EU services, but not shops or whitehouse.gov.
| I've always felt that it would make much more sense if CAs were
| much more restricted to specific "trust use cases".
| kreetx wrote:
| The things that get me thinking are:
|
| - for a CA that is business (or a non-profit), trust is their
| product, and if Let's Encrypt fails at it's job then clients
| can go elsewhere
|
| - not sure but in EU I would assume they are going to install
| all member states' CA certificates into all browsers, so then
| EU member state government A can MITM a connection for a
| citizen of member state B
|
| - even if a website has a certificate from any current
| provider, any EU government can still MITM a user without the
| company knowing
|
| Also, as it's technically possible to combat the legislation
| then how much would it actually help, wouldn't any "criminal"
| pay attention to it too, e.g by using an appropriate browser?
| g-b-r wrote:
| No, there's no need for your browser to accept particular CAs
|
| If some government sites want to use their CA that's one thing
| but what matters to identify you is the key stored in your ID
| card
| perihelions wrote:
| Ignorant question: what happens if Mozilla or Brave or whoever
| says fuck that, we're not complying? What's the enforcement
| mechanism for non-EU-based devs publishing FOSS freely on the
| global internet?
| yaris wrote:
| The enforcement mechanism is to warn and then ban non-
| compliant. There are just too few playeds in the field here. It
| would take only two major browser development companies to make
| the world 99% compliant. And the rest is statistical error no
| matter how safe and secure they are.
| perihelions wrote:
| How do you ban a FOSS?
| yaris wrote:
| "One cannot hang a song, sure, but one can hang a singer".
| There are not so many places where people can get Firefox
| or Chromium, even fewer places where they can get source
| code of the named browsers. [EDIT] grammar
| lakomen wrote:
| You criminalize the platform where it's published. The laws
| for that have been conjured in 2018.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/11/2/eu-digital-identity-fr...
|
| https://alecmuffett.com/article/108139
|
| (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38109581 and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38109731 respectively, but
| we merged the comments hither)
| pandastronaut wrote:
| Candid question : if this is european legislation, how browser
| editor would handle this regional specific requirement ? Provide
| several flavor of their browser ? I doubt people and companies
| from outside europe would agree to use a european flavored
| version of their browser.
| GTP wrote:
| In the past, browsers needed to have "export-grade
| cryptography", because the USA considered ciphers a weapon,
| thus subject to export rescriction. And this ended up playing a
| crucial role in downgrade attacks later on. So I would say yes,
| they already had to handle a similar situation in the past.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| It's worth noting that the technical team have a github where
| issue such as this can be raised.
|
| https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet
| account42 wrote:
| Why are they hosting this on GitHub and not on EU
| infrastructure?
| radicalbyte wrote:
| 1. The EU infrastructure sucks. 2. Reach. Lower the barrier =
| easier for everyone to contribute.
| JanisErdmanis wrote:
| Contrary to the majority of opinions here, I see this as a
| reasonable development for the state's sovereignty, which will
| positively affect the decentralisation of certificate
| authorities. I hope that unprofessional negligence by European
| authorities will produce enough precedents and evidence to show
| that certificate authorities can't be trusted blindly, and we
| will end up with transparent certificate authorities and web
| browsers which will audit every certificate with public logs with
| the help of History Trees.
| Hard_Space wrote:
| Wow - this one really crept up on me, after years of seeing it
| shot down in flames by people who actually understand the
| technology, and the implications (not least, the security
| implications). I wonder if the recent passing of the UK act
| emboldened them..?
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I've generally been supportive of the EU's web regulations, but
| this is utter insanity.
| 5ersi wrote:
| If you are concerned by this proposals, then you should check out
| current CAs trusted by your browser - all those CAs can issue
| rogue certificates trusted by your browser, that can be used in
| MITM attack.
|
| For example, CAs present in Firefox, that might give you pause:
| Beijing Certificate Authority, China Financial CA, Guang Dong CA
|
| The CA system in browsers is inherently broken and it allows
| state actors to MITM you and see all your traffic if they: 1.
| have ability to capture IP traffic (requires cooperation with
| ISP) 2. have ability to generate rogue certificate via
| cooperation with CA
| agwa wrote:
| Yes, but:
|
| 1. Major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Edge) only accept
| certificates which are published in Certificate Transparency
| logs.
|
| 2. If a CA is discovered to have issued MitM certificates, they
| are swiftly distrusted by browsers.
|
| So it's not really viable to use the existing CA system for
| MitM attacks.
|
| The eIDAS proposal would:
|
| 1. Prevent browsers from distrusting CAs which are used in MitM
| attacks.
|
| 2. Ban mandatory checks (such as Certificate Transparency) on
| certificates unless the EU agrees to them.
|
| That creates a system that is very viable for government MitM
| attacks.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > 2. If a CA is discovered to have issued MitM certificates,
| they are swiftly distrusted by browsers.
|
| Thats reassuring but, not knowing much about this, I have a
| couple of questions:
|
| 1. Is this proactively monitored for? And how? And by whom?
|
| 2. If a major state-level CA was discovered to have issued a
| mitm cert, would browser vendors really take the commercial
| hit of removing or distrusting their root cert?
| miohtama wrote:
| You can find more about certificate monitoring and who are
| involved here
|
| https://certificate.transparency.dev/
| agwa wrote:
| > _1. Is this proactively monitored for? And how? And by
| whom?_
|
| Yes, security researchers like myself are constantly
| looking in CT logs for suspicious certificates, and I've
| found many, most notably Symantec issuing certs for
| example.com (https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.securi
| ty.policy/c/fy...) and Certinomis issuing for test.com
| (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1496088).
| Both CAs were eventually distrusted. (But Certinomis will
| be back once eIDAS is adopted!)
|
| Domain owners can use Certificate Transparency Monitors to
| learn about suspicious certificates for their own domains.
| Here are some monitors:
|
| https://crt.sh/ - allows you to search for certificates for
| a domain
|
| https://github.com/SSLMate/certspotter/ - open source tool
| which notifies you when a certificate is issued for one of
| your domains
|
| https://sslmate.com/certspotter/ - commercial service that
| does the same, operated by my company
|
| > _2. If a major state-level CA was discovered to have
| issued a mitm cert, would browser vendors really take the
| commercial hit of removing or distrusting their root cert?_
|
| In 2017, Chrome and Firefox distrusted Symantec, which was
| at the time the world's largest certificate authority:
| https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to-
| dist...
|
| Symantec hadn't even issued MitM certs - they were just
| grossly incompetent. Distrusting them was very painful, but
| necessary to uphold the integrity of the CA system, and
| demonstrated conclusively that there is no such thing as a
| too-big-to-fail CA.
| omginternets wrote:
| Can you help me intuit what a suspicious certificate
| might look like in practice?
| agwa wrote:
| If you're a domain owner monitoring your own domains, a
| certificate is suspicious if it was not issued by one of
| the CAs that you use (e.g. you use Let's Encrypt, but you
| see a certificate for your domain in CT that was issued
| by Certinomis). If you keep an inventory of all of your
| certificates, then you can also cross-reference
| certificates from CT against your inventory, and flag any
| certificate that isn't in your inventory.
|
| If you're a security researcher monitoring other people's
| domains, you have to rely on heuristics - e.g. if a
| domain has a long history of getting certs from a major
| US CA, and then suddenly a tiny European CA issues them a
| certificate, that's pretty suspicious. When I found the
| example.com certificate misissued by Symantec, I though
| it was suspicious because it was also valid for
| subdomains like products.example.com and
| support.example.com, which don't make sense for a domain
| that's reserved for documentation purposes. ICANN
| operates example.com, so I emailed their security team to
| confirm that they did not authorize the certificate.
|
| The system works best if domain owners are monitoring
| their own domains, because only they know for sure if a
| certificate is authorized or not.
| omginternets wrote:
| That makes sense, thank you.
|
| Follow-up question: presumably, a state actor with
| dominion or leverage over a CA can coerce said CA into
| issuing a certificate, right?
| agwa wrote:
| Yes, though eventually the state actor would run out of
| CAs to coerce as all the CAs in their country get
| distrusted.
|
| The threat of distrust means CAs have a very strong
| incentive to contest any government orders, since if they
| comply their business is destroyed.
| omginternets wrote:
| That tracks. Thanks for helping me get a bead on this!
| uxp8u61q wrote:
| That's your smoking gun? CAs that issued certificates for
| example.com and test.com? You genuinely believe that the
| only possibility here is a vast conspiracy to defraud and
| steal?
| agwa wrote:
| > You genuinely believe that the only possibility here is
| a vast conspiracy to defraud and steal?
|
| Care to point out where I said that?
|
| example.com and test.com are real domains, and their
| owners did not authorize those certificates to be issued,
| so issuing them was a serious breach of the trust which
| CAs are expected to uphold. Furthermore, the discovery of
| these certificates led to investigations which turned up
| additional issues which are documented in detail here:
|
| https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Symantec_Issues
|
| https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Certinomis_Issues
| debugnik wrote:
| > 2. If a major state-level CA was discovered to have
| issued a mitm cert, would browser vendors really take the
| commercial hit of removing or distrusting their root cert?
|
| Pretty much every browser distrusted the root certificate
| from Spain's FNMT-RCM for a decade, so I think the answer's
| yes.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| The browser/CA forum's requirement to log all issuances into
| the CT log takes care of this; the EU mandate hardly has such
| requirements while still mandating the inclusion of root certs.
| The approach of the browser/CA forum vs EIDAS cannot be equated
| for this reason.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| It's not like Beijing CA can issue a rogue certifcate and
| suddenly a malicious actor would be able to decrypt all your
| internet traffic. You would have to connect to a service that
| uses those certificates in the first place.
|
| An interesting experiment would be to log all certificates used
| by the sites you normally use, say for a month, and then look
| at the list for anything shady. I have no ideia if an extension
| exists that would allow such and experiment, but the resulting
| list would be much more useful.
| lambdaone wrote:
| No, that's not needed at all. If the malicious actor can man-
| in-the-middle traffic to victimsite.com (say using a BGP
| hijack), they can serve HTTPS traffic to the end user from
| their MITM server, secured with a certificate issued to
| "victimsite.com" that is issued by their own CA, and the MITM
| can then in turn communicate to the real victimsite.com using
| HTTPS secured by the real site's certificate, signed by its
| own CA.
|
| Now, there are CAA DNS records, which serve the purpose of
| restricting the CAs that can sign a particular domain, which
| would of course be ignored by the malicious actor, but
| _could_ be checked by the end user's browser. But to the best
| of my knowledge, no browser does that.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| This will get noticed in a matter of seconds.
|
| But if your own government tells your own isp to reroute
| just your traffic over some MITM proxy, it's only you there
| to notice, and most probably, you won't.
| lambdaone wrote:
| In an ideal world, yes, they would by shut down in
| seconds. Yet BGP hijacks still occur in the real world;
| here's one from last month:
| https://slowmist.medium.com/analysis-of-balancer-bgp-
| hijacki...
|
| And you're certainly right about government-mandated
| traffic hijacking.
| smarnach wrote:
| You are correct that no browser is looking at CAA records,
| because it would be wrong to do so. CAA records don't
| retroactively revoke certificates that have already been
| issued. Their only purpose is for CAs to check them before
| issuing a certificate.
| miohtama wrote:
| In the case of mainland China, it's easy for the Party 1)
| issue a malicious certificate and 2) redirect your Internet
| traffic to MITM box. They do 2) for all the time when
| blackholing Internet traffic.
|
| With certificate logs there is a chance, I don't know how
| high, to catch 1).
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > For example, CAs present in Firefox, that might give you
| pause: Beijing Certificate Authority, China Financial CA, Guang
| Dong CA
|
| For someone living in the West, what are the consequences of
| deleting or distrusting those CAs?
| g-b-r wrote:
| probably none
|
| If you run into some websites which use them the browser will
| tell you that the certificate is invalid; you can always
| reinstall them if you prefer.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| You lose nothing, gain nothing. It's hard for china to
| reroute your traffic, and even if they did, what can they do
| to you after that?
|
| It's your own government that can actually do something bad
| to you.
|
| (unless you're doing some really really nasty stuff, and
| china wants to eliminate you for those reasons, and is
| willing to create a large international incident because of
| that).
| martin8412 wrote:
| Unless it's gotten better, it's super easy for China.. My
| traffic to EU World of Warcraft servers got hijacked all
| the time. I don't know if it was malicious or just
| incompetent Chinese ISPs, but you feel that extra latency
| when it goes through China.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| But this wasn't a bgp redirect, this was blizzard doing
| something... if chinese telcos acted as if they were
| blizzard telcos, there would be bgp filters and a lot of
| outrage in a matter of minutes. This is not a small deal.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >and even if they did, what can they do to you after that?
|
| An example of what China can do is they can have their
| workers put pressure on you. Often this pressure is soft,
| nothing as direct as 'do X or we hurt you with Y'. And
| often the request, at least at the start, is for something
| legal and only a bit unethical if even that. A little
| information to help win a contract, maybe a way to
| advertise to you why you should go with their vendor for a
| product, maybe just asking you if a specific coworker seems
| to have any interest in some odd topic or passing you a
| resume of someone who seems a good fit for the job. If they
| can they'll push for more with increasing levels of silver
| and lead, and if not, they use what they did get to
| pressure elsewhere.
| my4ng wrote:
| I think this is a matter of assumption. For communication
| through mainland China, one should assume that all internet
| traffic is actively surveilled with probably way easier methods
| than CAs. On the other hand, this assumption is definitely not
| as true in the EU, nor do I think the Chinese government forces
| Firefox to trust CAs by law (talking about irony)....
| jeremiahlee wrote:
| EU citizens wanting to oppose the current eIDAS proposal can use
| my edit of the open letter to send to their Members of European
| Parliament: https://www.jeremiahlee.com/posts/2023-eu-eidas-
| feedback/
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| you'd almost think that the /,i:'ju:/ is bent on subverting the
| internet. i'm experiencing fatigue from news like that already.
| can't they just stick with what they do best, standardizing
| vegetables and banning british sausages?
| surfingdino wrote:
| This is concerning, but I still have faith in big orgs' and
| governments' inability to do a simple thing right while paying
| consultancies a lot of money for it. I have experience
| implementing banking infrastructure using eIDAS for participant
| identification and I know how CAs and financial institutions do
| not get eIDAS. They make rookie mistakes and deny they've done
| something wrong for months while blaming the other party and
| seeking regulatory exemptions. I'd be surprised if the EU
| governments were able to implement it. What wouldn't surprise me
| would be them blaming browser devs for it.
| lacoolj wrote:
| EU is not the only place with insane laws like this in the
| pipeline. USA has been trying to introduce this kind of thing
| (EARN IT Act 2023) as well, under the guise of "preventing child
| trafficking".
|
| Terrifying times we live in where we may not even be able to keep
| our medical or financial information private anymore because of a
| handful of people voting on something they don't understand.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| In the EU they will take something that should be a standard,
| make it an actual law, and pretend it isn't about spying on you,
| and expect you to believe it. Very 1984.
| j45 wrote:
| Maybe LLms can help people more effectively engage with their
| political representatives on topics like this.
|
| I'm increasingly convinced that this type of legislation will
| continue to proliferate until legislation banning it is not
| pushed for and put in place.
| demarq wrote:
| People are already self censoring what they really think on
| social media, this will push people to self censor in private
| convos.
|
| At that point you've got to wonder what happens to democracy,
| when people are afraid to exchange ideas
| lakomen wrote:
| I think it's what some people are pushing for, how else can the
| Lisboa treaty be explained? Surely they weren't that short
| sighted.
| lakomen wrote:
| It's like, anything coming from the EU lately in regards to IT is
| a totalitarian nightmare
| phasmantistes wrote:
| Fundamentally, the whole issue with eIDAS comes down to one
| thing: you cannot mandate trust.
|
| If it's mandated, it isn't trust. It's something else. By
| mandating that browsers "trust" certain CAs, they're breaking the
| entire trust model of the internet.
|
| My only question is whether they truly don't understand this, do
| understand it but don't care, or are actively interested in
| destroying that trust.
| xinayder wrote:
| Does someone else think it's an extreme coincidence that we have
| Chat Control and now this in place? Pretty sure the negotiations
| around Chat Control revolve on this eIDAS being approved, that
| way you don't "undermine" encryption because, well, you have the
| keys to decrypt everything.
| moogly wrote:
| If they want to push more people to use the dark web, this would
| do it.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| So, the law says browsers have to trust eIDAS keys, but it
| doesn't say browsers can't complain about it, right?
|
| Like, put the eIDAS keys in a special "signed under protest"
| trust root, and throw up a bunch of scary warnings about how the
| EU is forcing Mozilla to trust those keys whenever they are used.
| Phrase it so that people who think "SSL warning" means "click
| advanced and 'i know the risks'" understand that this is
| equivalent to letting the CIA read your text messages.
| mindcrash wrote:
| Not just "internet security". There has been discussion that they
| want to use eIDAS for a _lot_ of things like identification in
| general and even a health passport.
|
| Consider that last thing. We have this thing called bodily
| integrity [1], which guarantees everybody has self-ownership
| regarding their body and thus what can be done with it.
|
| However, in the COVID period, it was clear as day that those who
| govern us dont give a rats ass about something like bodily
| integrity and going as far as taking away freedom of movement in
| order to make people comply with injecting themselves with a -
| until this very day - _experimental_ vaccine.
|
| Now consider what TPTB could do with a powerful toy like eIDAS.
|
| So no, it is not "just" about internet security. Its about slowly
| and surely stripping away every human right you have as a EU
| citizen.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodily_integrity
| elric wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand the point you're trying to make. Few
| rights are absolute. We, as a society, obviously try to prevent
| people from harming one another. If you're infected with a
| dangerous pathogen, and you refuse to do something about it on
| account of "bodily integrity", you will end up violating other
| people's bodily integrity by infecting them. That's bad, and it
| would certainly be within "TPTB"'s rights to stop you.
|
| As for vaccines being "experimental", they have saved many
| lives, and now that the dust has settled, they seem to have
| done very little harm.
|
| This all sounds rather like conspiracy nonsense, which isn't to
| say that eIDAS isn't stupid, but silly conspiracy nonsense like
| this undermines potential real concerns with eIDAS.
| elric wrote:
| Could someone link to some actually helpful writeups on eIDAS?
| The linked article doesn't mention what eIDAS is about, only
| vague but strongly worded language about it having to be stopped,
| with no justifications or even what it is.
|
| The comments too are less helpful than usual. A lot FUD and anti-
| EU sentiment (which may or may not be warranted, but there's very
| little objective reasoning going on).
|
| Addendum: yes, people could look it up, but given the strong call
| to action ("last chance to fix eIDAS!"), I would suggest that the
| onus to provide clear information is on the authors. You can
| barely get people to care about privacy at all, let alone when so
| little information is provided.
| workfromspace wrote:
| https://archive.ph/Ilhes (because it's a NRD-newly registered
| domain which my dns-hole blocks)
|
| Also brief info about website (for the ones who doesn't want to
| visit an unknown domain without knowing):
|
| A Mozilla website for open letter by 300+ cyber security experts,
| researchers and NGOs.
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