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This title is clickbait. The proposed amendment to the framework is just excessively bureaucratic around the management of cert authorities. This might potentia

by toyg 5y ago

This title is clickbait. The proposed amendment to the framework is just excessively bureaucratic around the management of cert authorities. This might potentially result in browsers accepting certificates from authorities with a slightly dubious track record (according to browser vendors), yes, but the certificates themselves will not necessarily be "less secure" - which the layman typically interprets as "cryptographically weaker". In practice, this would simply move a little bit of control over the list of accepted authorities from browser vendors to EU institutions, which is not terribly unreasonable a stance. In fact, as time passes and authorities become more and more tech savvy, I expect this sort of thing to happen more and more. There is a lot of unaccountable authority (eh) in internet infrastructure, with special companies like Google and Microsoft (and yes, Mozilla too) effectively holding the keys to many kingdoms. Even if such power is used scarcely and wisely, there is a question of legitimacy.

syshum 5y ago
The only thing worse the corporate control over CA's is government control over CA's... There is alternative to both, the solution to corporations having too much power is NEVER giving that power to governments
raxxorrax 5y ago
> but the certificates themselves will not necessarily be "less secure" I don't trust the EU to handle encryption. I don't think that is unreasonable especially with the attempts against it cloaked as "reasonable access". The chain of trust has weaknesses and any government institution can only fully undermine that trust. It would not last a week without abuse, the same happened with Covid tracking apps and location information. > there is a question of legitimacy. For the EU there is actually quite a lot of that. It is true that at some point we have to trust someone, but which problem do you want to see solved here?
- seszett 5y ago
  I actually have move trust into the EU institutions than into the three main browser vendors. The EU is certainly more legitimate in most respects than various US private organisations.
- raverbashing 5y ago
  > I don't trust the EU to handle encryption. Literally nowhere in the article it says that. The TL;DR is: "QWAC certificates will have to show the green banner" and maybe non-QWAC will have some kind of warning. The link on TFA is informative https://scotthelme.co.uk/looks-like-a-duck-swims-like-a-duck-qwacs-like-a-duck-probably-an-ev-certifiacate/ https://scotthelme.co.uk/looks-like-a-duck-swims-like-a-duck... (sounds like a CA lobbying for this crap) In the end I suspect browsers might revoke some QWAC certs if they feel they are invalid
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    The whole article is about mandatory certificates, of course that is basically taking control of the most widespread encryption in use today. Encryption that has its weakness in the chain of trust, which the EU wants to have an influence on. So yes, this is essentially handling encryption if the EU indeed wants to enforce mandated certificates. If you want to discuss technicalities and the problem of key exchange we can do that too.
- Denvercoder9 5y ago
  > the same happened with Covid tracking apps and location information. Do you have (a link to) more information on that? As far as I have seen (in NL) the Covid tracking app was designed and implemented fairly well and abuse has been very limited to non-existant.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    Here is an English source I could find: https://digit.site36.net/2022/01/22/tracking-corona-infections-german-luca-app-in-a-downfall/ https://digit.site36.net/2022/01/22/tracking-corona-infectio... There are two prominent apps in Germany. The other one is indeed secure against such attempts because it is technically not possible to get the information. I wouldn't even accuse the investigators here, it just shows that if there is a possibility for tracking, that it will be used. For better or worse reasons.
    - chopin 5y ago
      >I wouldn't even accuse the investigators here There is a legal mandate which forbids use other than for Covid-Tracking. There is no excuse for anyone involved in this.
  - chopin 5y ago
    The Luca-App in Germany has been misused DESPITE legislation that reserves use exclusively for Covid-Tracking. Health authorities have been complicit in this. Afaik there where no repercussions for the offenders.
    - zaarn 5y ago
      The Luca App is a privately developed app that a few german states paid for. The Corona-Warn-App has had no issues with privacy as it was designed privacy first and there is no possibility of data abuse to my knowledge.
    - rpadovani 5y ago
      The Luca-App drives me crazy. A private app pushed by some local governments, while an official, public one was available. Just why?
- snovv_crash 5y ago
  What do you expect the E.U. to do that Google or Microsoft isn't doing already?
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    I don't generally use browsers of these companies, but if they break the chain of trust they would damage themselves as much as any user. I believe in the self interest of these companies and the understanding how the effectiveness of TLS is reliant on trust. I would trust Google more than Microsoft that likes compliance a little bit too much, but since both want their browsers established, any compromise to security would disqualify them immediately. The EU has ambitions for surveillance as far as I know.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      They're already breaking the chain of trust. One of the EU's TSPs was dis-trusted by Mozilla after a long history of misissuance and BR violations. This isn't hypothetical; the EU is mandating the inclusion of insecure CAs.
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    I expect them to enforce slow, ponderous change processes which make it impractical to remove any but the most egregious violators from the trusted CA list.
ayende 5y ago
Less secure is exactly that. If `Mr Shady` is in the mandated list (by law), and the browsers are required to threat their certificates as trusted, what do you think is the impact on the whole ecosystem?
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  I would be perfectly happy with MR shady issuing such certificates if he has €100 billion in escriw with EU authorities and is legally forced to cover all losses and fraud caused by his certificates. Then, perhaps, mr. Shady will think twice
SiempreViernes 5y ago
How is the state of certificate authorities included in browsers these days? I remember some years back there being much noise about supposedly atrocious behaviour by some of the default included cert issuers...
- hannob 5y ago
  It's much better. There are processes to enforce good behavior, these are very transparent (basically everything is happening on public mailing lists, the mozilla bugtracker and wiki), and in extreme cases CAs get distrusted for real. None of that is happening for QWACs.
blibble 5y ago
> In practice, this would simply move a little bit of control over the list of accepted authorities from browser vendors to EU institutions, which is not terribly unreasonable a stance. I have zero trust in the competence and intentions of EU institutions I already have to trust the firm that maintains the browser, how does adding another party help exactly? this proposal's endgame is mandatory key escrow (attempt number #8 or so)
- rosetremiere 5y ago
  > I have zero trust in EU institutions, Why is that?
  - rjzzleep 5y ago
    Because of people like Axel Voss, Von der Leyen etc. https://qz.com/1389385/article-11-and-article-13-axel-voss-is-surprised-by-eu-copyright-law/ https://qz.com/1389385/article-11-and-article-13-axel-voss-i...
  - LeifCarrotson 5y ago
    Browser vendors have an incentive to maintain trust, it's their stock in trade. If they screw up, it directly affects their bottom line because people will move elsewhere. Their goals align closely with my own. A foreign government (or even my own) has somewhere between zero and weak alignment with my goals. There's little reason they would want to choose good certificate authorities and strong reasons why they would choose ones their intelligence agencies can backdoor. Why should I add them to the chain of trust?
    - Jensson 5y ago
      Browser vendors monetize your data, that is their main trade. Having lots of users doesn't matter if you don't control them in some way, such as decide who gets to be trusted as a CA. The browsers are supporting the current tech hegemony for CA's, for some reason Americans are much more "trustworthy" than people from anywhere else, do you really believe that? Why should the people in Europe be forced to trust shady American companies like Google or Microsoft who are or likely will get compromised by the American state? It makes sense for them to regulate this so that they can have European options.
hannob 5y ago
CAs with a dubious track record are a far bigger problem in terms of practical security than weak cryptographic keys.
- patmorgan23 5y ago
  Both are equally important because either one will break the security. The CA problem is the harder human problem to solve though.
bugmen0t 5y ago
With the commodification of free and automated certificates, I'd argue that authorities become less and less tech savvy: There is little to no money in the business sector, which means there's less possibility to keep technical people around. Also, I am surprised what exactly is making you think that the baseline requirements do not exist for security reasons (even if it isn't exclusively about cryptographic security).
- toyg 5y ago
  > With the commodification of free and automated certificates, I'd argue that authorities become less and less tech savvy That's not what I meant. The point is that, as time passes, more and more people are involved in political decision-making who understand how tech works. > what exactly is making you think that the baseline requirements do not exist for security reasons Once you move out of the nitty-gritty of crypto tech, "security" is in the eye of the beholder. Is a solution more "secure", for society at large, if it allows terrorists to communicate undisturbed? You might say yes, others might say no. There isn't an absolute scale there. Choosing trust is one of those areas where the solution is political, not technical, hence forever debatable. So a statement implying that one set of compromises is "less secure" just because it moves trust from certain subjects to other ones (more formally accountable, in this case), is simply not objectively true, and really meant to muddle the waters.
JoshTriplett 5y ago
> In practice, this would simply move a little bit of control over the list of accepted authorities from browser vendors to EU institutions, which is not terribly unreasonable a stance. And what happens when one of those institutions violates existing widespread CA policy, such as by issuing a certificate for MITM purposes, or otherwise making the web less secure? Right now, browsers can simply remove such CAs based on their established policy. (This isn't a hypothetical; browsers have had to remove CAs for such misbehavior in the past.)
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Probably browsers will remove it anyway and deal with EU in court if they make a stink about it. As it is, browser companies[0] are the sole authority on what is and isn't a valid CA. At least the EU leadership is elected. [0] and let's be realistic here, this means Google.
  - SahAssar 5y ago
    Historically google and apple has followed mozillas decisions on CAs most of the time (google didn't even have their own program for a long time). I think it is still somewhat accepted that if you get approved by mozilla you will probably get approval from apple and google pretty soon. MS can be a bit weird though IIRC.
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    In practice there is every reason to believe it means m.d.s.policy, and thus anybody who cares. In principle Apple, Google, and Microsoft can do whatever they want, but well, go back and see the history of such interventions for yourself and draw your own conclusions about where the crucial decision was made.
  - rocqua 5y ago
    When it comes to which CAs are trusted, Mozzila is generally in the lead. Not an elected group, true. But a foundation with a public charitable goal, and an entity with much less interest in being able to intercept communications than states. I think it's better of in the hands of an un-elected foundation than in the hands of an elected, but politicized entity with interests in intercepting communication.
hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
I trust the people I implicitly have to trust (browsers could backdoor your browser, so why would they trust a dodgy certificate). I don’t trust a government, especially not my own, to handle certificate authority selection without involving politics.
- okl 5y ago
  Hey, nothing keeps you from managing your trusted certificates on your machine, right? Maybe this initiative can even highlight some issues regarding dubious CAs and make people care about whom they trust more explicitly.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
    Ah yes, I’ll just tell grandma she should just validate the corporate behaviours of certificate authorities herself. How did I not think of this before?
arsome 5y ago
Hoping the browser vendors will enable this only for EU users, I want nothing to do with bad CAs.
coldtea 5y ago
>but the certificates themselves will not necessarily be "less secure" - which the layman typically interprets as "cryptographically weaker". Less secure is more about trust than the crypto algorithm... The strongest algorithm with no trust in the authority issuing it, is useless.
scarface74 5y ago
I’m always amazed at HN posters undying trust of government with respect to technology which has repeatedly shown itself to be corrupt, inept and has never taken the time to think through unintended consequences.
- toyg 5y ago
  Because private companies are always competent, never abuse their privileges, and always act in the best interest of society at large. /S
  - scarface74 5y ago
    The difference is that private companies don’t have the power to force me to do anything - the government can forcible take away my property and liberty.
  - gruez 5y ago
    The difference is that governments have a monopoly on violence. Corporations don't.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    If I understand correctly, this legislation isn't about the government issuing certificates; it's about the government granting inclusion privileges to the same kinds of private companies that you're worried about. I distrust private companies too, but I trust Mozilla more than I trust companies like Camerfirma, and we have a pretty long track-record that shows us that governments are typically slow to address misconduct in private companies they're partnered with. I'm not sure I understand why this is being treated as a private company vs government debate; in my mind this is a debate over whether we should all be required by the government to trust private companies that Mozilla claims already today don't meet their security standards. It feels odd to claim that a government telling me I have to trust a private company fixes corporate incompetence or malfeasance. You don't see a potential for abuse of corporate privilege or for exploitative behavior when a private, for-profit CA can't be distrusted in browsers without them first petitioning the government?
_8j50 5y ago
What authority does the EU have to tell browsers what settings to use in their non-commercial product? The EU is always free to fork browsers or maintain a version tuned to EU standards and let users choose what they want.
michaelt 5y ago
Does the EU government, or the US government, or any other government for that matter strike you as doing a particularly good job of legislating around the internet? Personally, my impression is the legislation is at best hit-and-miss. You might get some great privacy protection. You might get mandatory encryption back doors. You might get free mobile data roaming. You might get cookie warning messages. You might get worldwide license-free spectrum, some of the most economically productive spectrum ever. You might get a patent system that lets people patent slide-to-unlock. You might get the state funding university research and giving the results away for free. You might get the DMCA giving youtube creators getting copyright strikes because someone's copyrighted silence. You might get cable rights of way and common carrier protections, which are vital to the communications industry working. You might get government ID checks for social media users. Seems to me legislation is a coin flip - sometimes great, other times completely boneheaded.
sigzero 5y ago
> In practice, this would simply move a little bit of control over the list of accepted authorities from browser vendors to EU institutions, which is not terribly unreasonable a stance. I actually do not think that is what we want at all.
danShumway 5y ago
> but the certificates themselves will not necessarily be "less secure" - which the layman typically interprets as "cryptographically weaker". I think this is word-games. If all we cared about was cryptographic security we wouldn't have have certificate authorities in the first place, making certificates that are themselves secure isn't hard. The only reason we care about certificate authorities is because of the security of the surrounding process: which is exactly the stuff that Mozilla is complaining about. You're minimizing the most important part of a certificate authority. It's like going into a discussion about a potential phishing vulnerability and saying, "there's not security risk because the browser requests are still going over SSL." The point of a certificate authority isn't just to have cryptographically secure certificates, it's to have a secure issuer. So it feels really misleading to completely jump over the concerns Mozilla has laid out about weaker standards for issuer security and say that it's fine just because everything is still encrypted.
pinephoneguy 5y ago
>certificates from authorities with a slightly dubious track record CAs can sign certs for any website, that absolutely makes the web less secure.
Canada 5y ago
Governments should have absolutely zero control or influence over the trusted CA list that browsers ship.
kmeisthax 5y ago
The problem isn't merely the fact that the EU wants some control over the process, it's the fact that the EU wants to revive a bunch of dead ideas and bad CAs in the process of doing so. The article specifically cites a CA that was banned from root trust stores which the EU wants to forcibly un-ban, which is very bad. Yes - strictly speaking, those bad CAs can still issue "cryptographically secure" certs. However, the layman does not have a clue what "cryptographic security" means. They just hear "~~b̷̧͚́͝ȧ̷̠̜̦̉k̵̯̘̠͊̂e̴̞̓̃m̵̹͒̂͠o̵͎̣̎̓n̴͔̤̖̊̑o̴̙̰̼̍c̶͖̅͊h̶͔͛̇̓i̸͚̎n̶̮̬̊̒c̴̮̈̌ḣ̸̹i̵̤̊̈́n̴̹̮̾̃̈́~~ security", parse out the bits of English they do understand, and treat the rest as a linguistic intensifier, which is highly misleading. In fact, "cryptographic" in this context specifically ignores the authentication of the key. It just means that it's computationally infeasible[0] to decrypt the message if you only have the ciphertext. However, in order to get this security, you need to make sure only the intended recipient has the key. This not only means that the recipient needs to keep their key safe, but that you need to make sure that you're using the intended recipient's key. Otherwise, an attacker could just hand you their key instead of the recipients, and then decrypt your messages and do whatever they want with them. In other words, secure key authentication and exchange is a necessary precondition for cryptographic concealment. In some simple cryptosystems, we don't talk about this, mostly because we imagine the recipient and sender exchanging keys in such a way that the system doesn't need to care about it. Perhaps they exchanged paper keys in person in the middle of a potato field in Idaho. However, this is highly restrictive; imagine having to drive to every tech start-up's HQ to copy some QR codes with their public keys on it before you could visit a new website. What we would rather have is a way to take one securely-exchanged key we already have, and use it to securely exchange more keys over the Internet. That's what a CA ultimately is - an entity we already have keys for, that is capable of making sure our recipients are who they say they are. So if I go to news.ycombinator.com, the server I connect to will send me a message from that CA saying that they checked the server and validated that it's run by the person who owns news.ycombinator.com. Except now that makes the CA the weakest link in the system. A CA that is malicious can totally strip any and all of the protections that HTTPS is supposed to provide. So browser vendors are really, really picky as to what CAs they put in their trust stores. CAs that habitually make mistakes or lie out of their asses get removed because they are not trust-worthy. Any legal proposal that would make it easier or even possible for them to reverse such a decision needs to be treated like cancer. Yes, I know that browser vendors hold a lot of power in this equation - but there is little evidence that the measures they impose upon CAs are excessive or pretextual. Furthermore, the proposed replacement is making mistakes that the browser vendors aren't, so it's a strict security downgrade for no added freedom[1]. [0] trying every possible key requires more compute time than exists in the current universe [1] CAs are sideloadable on every device ever. Yes, even iOS. However, the only use for this is for... - Securing local web servers without an FQDN - Using enterprise security/spyware/filtering products that need to strip HTTPS in order to work I know of no case in which a CA has gotten into the business by telling people to install their alternative certificate. There are some edge cases in which very large CAs - specifically Let's Encrypt - have transitioned from having another root cross-sign them to becoming a root CA themselves. However, that only affected really old devices, and you could at least theoretically install the ISRG Root X1 cert on that device to work around this. https://letsencrypt.org/docs/dst-root-ca-x3-expiration-september-2021/ https://letsencrypt.org/docs/dst-root-ca-x3-expiration-septe...
logifail 5y ago
> the certificates themselves will not necessarily be "less secure" - which the layman typically interprets as "cryptographically weaker" We don't just need _cryptographic_ strength to deliver security, otherwise we'd all be using self-signed certificates...

by toyg 5y ago

syshum 5y ago

The only thing worse the corporate control over CA's is government control over CA's... There is alternative to both, the solution to corporations having too much power is NEVER giving that power to governments

raxxorrax 5y ago

> but the certificates themselves will not necessarily be "less secure" I don't trust the EU to handle encryption. I don't think that is unreasonable especially with the attempts against it cloaked as "reasonable access". The chain of trust has weaknesses and any government institution can only fully undermine that trust. It would not last a week without abuse, the same happened with Covid tracking apps and location information. > there is a question of legitimacy. For the EU there is actually quite a lot of that. It is true that at some point we have to trust someone, but which problem do you want to see solved here?

seszett 5y ago
I actually have move trust into the EU institutions than into the three main browser vendors. The EU is certainly more legitimate in most respects than various US private organisations.
raverbashing 5y ago
> I don't trust the EU to handle encryption. Literally nowhere in the article it says that. The TL;DR is: "QWAC certificates will have to show the green banner" and maybe non-QWAC will have some kind of warning. The link on TFA is informative https://scotthelme.co.uk/looks-like-a-duck-swims-like-a-duck-qwacs-like-a-duck-probably-an-ev-certifiacate/ https://scotthelme.co.uk/looks-like-a-duck-swims-like-a-duck... (sounds like a CA lobbying for this crap) In the end I suspect browsers might revoke some QWAC certs if they feel they are invalid
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  The whole article is about mandatory certificates, of course that is basically taking control of the most widespread encryption in use today. Encryption that has its weakness in the chain of trust, which the EU wants to have an influence on. So yes, this is essentially handling encryption if the EU indeed wants to enforce mandated certificates. If you want to discuss technicalities and the problem of key exchange we can do that too.
Denvercoder9 5y ago
> the same happened with Covid tracking apps and location information. Do you have (a link to) more information on that? As far as I have seen (in NL) the Covid tracking app was designed and implemented fairly well and abuse has been very limited to non-existant.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  Here is an English source I could find: https://digit.site36.net/2022/01/22/tracking-corona-infections-german-luca-app-in-a-downfall/ https://digit.site36.net/2022/01/22/tracking-corona-infectio... There are two prominent apps in Germany. The other one is indeed secure against such attempts because it is technically not possible to get the information. I wouldn't even accuse the investigators here, it just shows that if there is a possibility for tracking, that it will be used. For better or worse reasons.
  - chopin 5y ago
    >I wouldn't even accuse the investigators here There is a legal mandate which forbids use other than for Covid-Tracking. There is no excuse for anyone involved in this.
- chopin 5y ago
  The Luca-App in Germany has been misused DESPITE legislation that reserves use exclusively for Covid-Tracking. Health authorities have been complicit in this. Afaik there where no repercussions for the offenders.
  - zaarn 5y ago
    The Luca App is a privately developed app that a few german states paid for. The Corona-Warn-App has had no issues with privacy as it was designed privacy first and there is no possibility of data abuse to my knowledge.
  - rpadovani 5y ago
    The Luca-App drives me crazy. A private app pushed by some local governments, while an official, public one was available. Just why?
snovv_crash 5y ago
What do you expect the E.U. to do that Google or Microsoft isn't doing already?
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  I don't generally use browsers of these companies, but if they break the chain of trust they would damage themselves as much as any user. I believe in the self interest of these companies and the understanding how the effectiveness of TLS is reliant on trust. I would trust Google more than Microsoft that likes compliance a little bit too much, but since both want their browsers established, any compromise to security would disqualify them immediately. The EU has ambitions for surveillance as far as I know.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    They're already breaking the chain of trust. One of the EU's TSPs was dis-trusted by Mozilla after a long history of misissuance and BR violations. This isn't hypothetical; the EU is mandating the inclusion of insecure CAs.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  I expect them to enforce slow, ponderous change processes which make it impractical to remove any but the most egregious violators from the trusted CA list.

ayende 5y ago

Less secure is exactly that. If `Mr Shady` is in the mandated list (by law), and the browsers are required to threat their certificates as trusted, what do you think is the impact on the whole ecosystem?

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
I would be perfectly happy with MR shady issuing such certificates if he has €100 billion in escriw with EU authorities and is legally forced to cover all losses and fraud caused by his certificates. Then, perhaps, mr. Shady will think twice

SiempreViernes 5y ago

How is the state of certificate authorities included in browsers these days? I remember some years back there being much noise about supposedly atrocious behaviour by some of the default included cert issuers...

hannob 5y ago
It's much better. There are processes to enforce good behavior, these are very transparent (basically everything is happening on public mailing lists, the mozilla bugtracker and wiki), and in extreme cases CAs get distrusted for real. None of that is happening for QWACs.

blibble 5y ago

> In practice, this would simply move a little bit of control over the list of accepted authorities from browser vendors to EU institutions, which is not terribly unreasonable a stance. I have zero trust in the competence and intentions of EU institutions I already have to trust the firm that maintains the browser, how does adding another party help exactly? this proposal's endgame is mandatory key escrow (attempt number #8 or so)

rosetremiere 5y ago
> I have zero trust in EU institutions, Why is that?
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  Because of people like Axel Voss, Von der Leyen etc. https://qz.com/1389385/article-11-and-article-13-axel-voss-is-surprised-by-eu-copyright-law/ https://qz.com/1389385/article-11-and-article-13-axel-voss-i...
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  Browser vendors have an incentive to maintain trust, it's their stock in trade. If they screw up, it directly affects their bottom line because people will move elsewhere. Their goals align closely with my own. A foreign government (or even my own) has somewhere between zero and weak alignment with my goals. There's little reason they would want to choose good certificate authorities and strong reasons why they would choose ones their intelligence agencies can backdoor. Why should I add them to the chain of trust?
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Browser vendors monetize your data, that is their main trade. Having lots of users doesn't matter if you don't control them in some way, such as decide who gets to be trusted as a CA. The browsers are supporting the current tech hegemony for CA's, for some reason Americans are much more "trustworthy" than people from anywhere else, do you really believe that? Why should the people in Europe be forced to trust shady American companies like Google or Microsoft who are or likely will get compromised by the American state? It makes sense for them to regulate this so that they can have European options.

hannob 5y ago

CAs with a dubious track record are a far bigger problem in terms of practical security than weak cryptographic keys.

patmorgan23 5y ago
Both are equally important because either one will break the security. The CA problem is the harder human problem to solve though.

bugmen0t 5y ago

With the commodification of free and automated certificates, I'd argue that authorities become less and less tech savvy: There is little to no money in the business sector, which means there's less possibility to keep technical people around. Also, I am surprised what exactly is making you think that the baseline requirements do not exist for security reasons (even if it isn't exclusively about cryptographic security).

toyg 5y ago
> With the commodification of free and automated certificates, I'd argue that authorities become less and less tech savvy That's not what I meant. The point is that, as time passes, more and more people are involved in political decision-making who understand how tech works. > what exactly is making you think that the baseline requirements do not exist for security reasons Once you move out of the nitty-gritty of crypto tech, "security" is in the eye of the beholder. Is a solution more "secure", for society at large, if it allows terrorists to communicate undisturbed? You might say yes, others might say no. There isn't an absolute scale there. Choosing trust is one of those areas where the solution is political, not technical, hence forever debatable. So a statement implying that one set of compromises is "less secure" just because it moves trust from certain subjects to other ones (more formally accountable, in this case), is simply not objectively true, and really meant to muddle the waters.

JoshTriplett 5y ago

> In practice, this would simply move a little bit of control over the list of accepted authorities from browser vendors to EU institutions, which is not terribly unreasonable a stance. And what happens when one of those institutions violates existing widespread CA policy, such as by issuing a certificate for MITM purposes, or otherwise making the web less secure? Right now, browsers can simply remove such CAs based on their established policy. (This isn't a hypothetical; browsers have had to remove CAs for such misbehavior in the past.)

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Probably browsers will remove it anyway and deal with EU in court if they make a stink about it. As it is, browser companies[0] are the sole authority on what is and isn't a valid CA. At least the EU leadership is elected. [0] and let's be realistic here, this means Google.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  Historically google and apple has followed mozillas decisions on CAs most of the time (google didn't even have their own program for a long time). I think it is still somewhat accepted that if you get approved by mozilla you will probably get approval from apple and google pretty soon. MS can be a bit weird though IIRC.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  In practice there is every reason to believe it means m.d.s.policy, and thus anybody who cares. In principle Apple, Google, and Microsoft can do whatever they want, but well, go back and see the history of such interventions for yourself and draw your own conclusions about where the crucial decision was made.
- rocqua 5y ago
  When it comes to which CAs are trusted, Mozzila is generally in the lead. Not an elected group, true. But a foundation with a public charitable goal, and an entity with much less interest in being able to intercept communications than states. I think it's better of in the hands of an un-elected foundation than in the hands of an elected, but politicized entity with interests in intercepting communication.

hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago

I trust the people I implicitly have to trust (browsers could backdoor your browser, so why would they trust a dodgy certificate). I don’t trust a government, especially not my own, to handle certificate authority selection without involving politics.

okl 5y ago
Hey, nothing keeps you from managing your trusted certificates on your machine, right? Maybe this initiative can even highlight some issues regarding dubious CAs and make people care about whom they trust more explicitly.
- hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
  Ah yes, I’ll just tell grandma she should just validate the corporate behaviours of certificate authorities herself. How did I not think of this before?

arsome 5y ago

Hoping the browser vendors will enable this only for EU users, I want nothing to do with bad CAs.

coldtea 5y ago

>but the certificates themselves will not necessarily be "less secure" - which the layman typically interprets as "cryptographically weaker". Less secure is more about trust than the crypto algorithm... The strongest algorithm with no trust in the authority issuing it, is useless.

scarface74 5y ago

I’m always amazed at HN posters undying trust of government with respect to technology which has repeatedly shown itself to be corrupt, inept and has never taken the time to think through unintended consequences.

toyg 5y ago
Because private companies are always competent, never abuse their privileges, and always act in the best interest of society at large. /S
- scarface74 5y ago
  The difference is that private companies don’t have the power to force me to do anything - the government can forcible take away my property and liberty.
- gruez 5y ago
  The difference is that governments have a monopoly on violence. Corporations don't.
- danShumway 5y ago
  If I understand correctly, this legislation isn't about the government issuing certificates; it's about the government granting inclusion privileges to the same kinds of private companies that you're worried about. I distrust private companies too, but I trust Mozilla more than I trust companies like Camerfirma, and we have a pretty long track-record that shows us that governments are typically slow to address misconduct in private companies they're partnered with. I'm not sure I understand why this is being treated as a private company vs government debate; in my mind this is a debate over whether we should all be required by the government to trust private companies that Mozilla claims already today don't meet their security standards. It feels odd to claim that a government telling me I have to trust a private company fixes corporate incompetence or malfeasance. You don't see a potential for abuse of corporate privilege or for exploitative behavior when a private, for-profit CA can't be distrusted in browsers without them first petitioning the government?

_8j50 5y ago

What authority does the EU have to tell browsers what settings to use in their non-commercial product? The EU is always free to fork browsers or maintain a version tuned to EU standards and let users choose what they want.

michaelt 5y ago

Does the EU government, or the US government, or any other government for that matter strike you as doing a particularly good job of legislating around the internet? Personally, my impression is the legislation is at best hit-and-miss. You might get some great privacy protection. You might get mandatory encryption back doors. You might get free mobile data roaming. You might get cookie warning messages. You might get worldwide license-free spectrum, some of the most economically productive spectrum ever. You might get a patent system that lets people patent slide-to-unlock. You might get the state funding university research and giving the results away for free. You might get the DMCA giving youtube creators getting copyright strikes because someone's copyrighted silence. You might get cable rights of way and common carrier protections, which are vital to the communications industry working. You might get government ID checks for social media users. Seems to me legislation is a coin flip - sometimes great, other times completely boneheaded.

sigzero 5y ago

danShumway 5y ago

> but the certificates themselves will not necessarily be "less secure" - which the layman typically interprets as "cryptographically weaker". I think this is word-games. If all we cared about was cryptographic security we wouldn't have have certificate authorities in the first place, making certificates that are themselves secure isn't hard. The only reason we care about certificate authorities is because of the security of the surrounding process: which is exactly the stuff that Mozilla is complaining about. You're minimizing the most important part of a certificate authority. It's like going into a discussion about a potential phishing vulnerability and saying, "there's not security risk because the browser requests are still going over SSL." The point of a certificate authority isn't just to have cryptographically secure certificates, it's to have a secure issuer. So it feels really misleading to completely jump over the concerns Mozilla has laid out about weaker standards for issuer security and say that it's fine just because everything is still encrypted.

pinephoneguy 5y ago

>certificates from authorities with a slightly dubious track record CAs can sign certs for any website, that absolutely makes the web less secure.

Canada 5y ago

Governments should have absolutely zero control or influence over the trusted CA list that browsers ship.

kmeisthax 5y ago

The problem isn't merely the fact that the EU wants some control over the process, it's the fact that the EU wants to revive a bunch of dead ideas and bad CAs in the process of doing so. The article specifically cites a CA that was banned from root trust stores which the EU wants to forcibly un-ban, which is very bad. Yes - strictly speaking, those bad CAs can still issue "cryptographically secure" certs. However, the layman does not have a clue what "cryptographic security" means. They just hear "~~b̷̧͚́͝ȧ̷̠̜̦̉k̵̯̘̠͊̂e̴̞̓̃m̵̹͒̂͠o̵͎̣̎̓n̴͔̤̖̊̑o̴̙̰̼̍c̶͖̅͊h̶͔͛̇̓i̸͚̎n̶̮̬̊̒c̴̮̈̌ḣ̸̹i̵̤̊̈́n̴̹̮̾̃̈́~~ security", parse out the bits of English they do understand, and treat the rest as a linguistic intensifier, which is highly misleading. In fact, "cryptographic" in this context specifically ignores the authentication of the key. It just means that it's computationally infeasible[0] to decrypt the message if you only have the ciphertext. However, in order to get this security, you need to make sure only the intended recipient has the key. This not only means that the recipient needs to keep their key safe, but that you need to make sure that you're using the intended recipient's key. Otherwise, an attacker could just hand you their key instead of the recipients, and then decrypt your messages and do whatever they want with them. In other words, secure key authentication and exchange is a necessary precondition for cryptographic concealment. In some simple cryptosystems, we don't talk about this, mostly because we imagine the recipient and sender exchanging keys in such a way that the system doesn't need to care about it. Perhaps they exchanged paper keys in person in the middle of a potato field in Idaho. However, this is highly restrictive; imagine having to drive to every tech start-up's HQ to copy some QR codes with their public keys on it before you could visit a new website. What we would rather have is a way to take one securely-exchanged key we already have, and use it to securely exchange more keys over the Internet. That's what a CA ultimately is - an entity we already have keys for, that is capable of making sure our recipients are who they say they are. So if I go to news.ycombinator.com, the server I connect to will send me a message from that CA saying that they checked the server and validated that it's run by the person who owns news.ycombinator.com. Except now that makes the CA the weakest link in the system. A CA that is malicious can totally strip any and all of the protections that HTTPS is supposed to provide. So browser vendors are really, really picky as to what CAs they put in their trust stores. CAs that habitually make mistakes or lie out of their asses get removed because they are not trust-worthy. Any legal proposal that would make it easier or even possible for them to reverse such a decision needs to be treated like cancer. Yes, I know that browser vendors hold a lot of power in this equation - but there is little evidence that the measures they impose upon CAs are excessive or pretextual. Furthermore, the proposed replacement is making mistakes that the browser vendors aren't, so it's a strict security downgrade for no added freedom[1]. [0] trying every possible key requires more compute time than exists in the current universe [1] CAs are sideloadable on every device ever. Yes, even iOS. However, the only use for this is for... - Securing local web servers without an FQDN - Using enterprise security/spyware/filtering products that need to strip HTTPS in order to work I know of no case in which a CA has gotten into the business by telling people to install their alternative certificate. There are some edge cases in which very large CAs - specifically Let's Encrypt - have transitioned from having another root cross-sign them to becoming a root CA themselves. However, that only affected really old devices, and you could at least theoretically install the ISRG Root X1 cert on that device to work around this. https://letsencrypt.org/docs/dst-root-ca-x3-expiration-september-2021/ https://letsencrypt.org/docs/dst-root-ca-x3-expiration-septe...

logifail 5y ago

> the certificates themselves will not necessarily be "less secure" - which the layman typically interprets as "cryptographically weaker" We don't just need _cryptographic_ strength to deliver security, otherwise we'd all be using self-signed certificates...