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Article 45 of eIDAS 2.0 will roll back web security by 12 years

253 points by agwa 3y ago

frankjr 3y ago
If anything, this shows how absolutely idiotic the whole certificate authority system is.
java-man 3y ago
They never stop trying, don't they?
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  Alas, there's just so many people with so many reasons for wanting to grab & coerce the noosphere's thoughpaths to route through their specific power grabs. The move would spring up spontaneously in so many ways. Thanks again EFF for so vigilantly watching against encroachment.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- HPsquared 3y ago
  A "no" is temporary; a "yes" is permanent. Is there any way to enact a permanent "no"?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - LightHugger 3y ago
    in the US, constitutional amendments. Not sure about the equivalent in the EU
    - contravariant 3y ago
      Bit trickier in the EU. The countries themselves have constitutions that can be amended, with varying ways in which they can be enforced. In theory this should give sufficient protection, but it becomes a bit complicated if the EU enacts regulations that contradict national laws or even the constitution. The EU derives its power not from a constitution but from its founding treaties. As best I can tell the EU claims these treaties have precedence, but honestly it's a bit unclear how it could overrule the constitutions that gave the signatories the power to ratify the treaties. I do know that the EU wasn't happy when Poland ruled some parts of these treaties unconstitutional (which is really part of a much bigger political fight, but is illustrative).
      - toyg 3y ago
        Most postwar constitutions explicitly allow for transfer of sovereignty to structures necessary to maintain peace among nations. They were originally meant for UN-like organisms and apply equally to the EU.
        tonyarkles 3y ago
        Canada’s “constitution” explicitly creates a back door right in section 1. I’ve heard Canadian legal scholars comment that the only part of the Charter that would likely completely stand up against a section 1 challenge is section 12: “the right not to be subjected to any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment”
  - mminer237 3y ago
    No, any law can be changed. The closest you can come is to make a Constitution hard to change and embed a right to free speech, including encrypted speech, therein. Anything beyond that has to be a cultural conservation.
    - Saline9515 3y ago
      EU laws can't be changed unfortunately. The unelected European Commission is the only one that has the right of initiative.
- tomjen3 3y ago
  Not when they don't suffer for trying. An unfortunately there is no good way, no technology board of overseers, who takes away their (smart)phone priviledges when they don't behave.
  - zlg_codes 3y ago
    Fingerprinting technology could be used to isolate state officials and deny them access based on that 'profile'.
ShakataGaNai 3y ago
It just doesn't make sense to me why anyone tries these things. The reality of the situation would be very obvious. Just because everyone in the EU is in the EU, doesn't make them one big happy family. Do the French want the Germans to be able to spy on their citizens? Seems unlikely. And at a larger scale, the US isn't going to go with that. So the browsers will simply be updated to distrust all of these CA's whom no longer can be trusted and... those EU CA's are out of business. Poof. Hell, if it were reverse you'd see the EU up in arms. "Why should we trust the USA?" - And rightly you shouldn't. That's why Galileo exists. But on the Internet, it doesn't work that way. You can't just do your own thing, lest you kneecap your citizens. How will the Europeans citizens react if their own "free and democratic" governments take away their access to Wikipedia? Or Facebook? Or Tiktok? Using known suspect TLS Certs would also violate basically every B2B contract. When businesses sign contracts for SaaS applications, it involves some verbiage about encryption and best practices and data security in transit and at rest. What business will WANT to sign a deal that says "Yes, it's ok to use a TLS cert that we know our government can intercept" when they have the option to use a cert from someone else that's secure? Cool, shoot your own businesses in the foot too, while you're at it. Freaking politicians. Can't be bothered to do anything about the issues we citizens ACTUALLY want, but instead are too busy meddling in shit that no one wants.
- graemep 3y ago
  > The reality of the situation would be very obvious. Just because everyone in the EU is in the EU, doesn't make them one big happy family. The EU thinks they should be
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    > The EU thinks I understand that it helps to have a name for something like this, but there is no "EU". "It" cannot think. Heed the Meehan quote; "Men are at war because each man is at war with himself". It's not just that human minds are one psychotic insight away from seeing our dissociative identity disorder just beneath the surface... evey institution and collective is the same. What is wrong in the "EU" (principally the Commission) is that it's large and disparate enough for some extraordinary bad actors to hide within it and exercise undue toxic influence. It is by lack of transparency that they cannot easily be rooted out, named, shamed and dislodged. Meanwhile much of the "EU" functions very well, and cares for its citizens.
extraduder_ire 3y ago
Is there even a reason given for this? Like, why it might be a good idea to enforce?
buildbot 3y ago
How does CALEA work in the USA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...) Does it fail on HTTPS communications or is a similar "rogue" CA that allows law enforcement to decrypt traffic as they need?
- TheIronMark 3y ago
  I don't believe CALEA has any provisions for requiring CA providers to allow decrypt.
  - buildbot 3y ago
    Thanks!
- mminer237 3y ago
  It doesn't really have anything to do with the Internet. CALEA only applies to phone calls. VoIP calls are only encrypted to and from the carrier, so they can tap them there with pre-existing telephony hardware if they have a warrant to do so.
  - buildbot 3y ago
    It applies to broadband, in the second paragraph of the wikipedia article: "it has since been extended to cover broadband Internet and VoIP traffic. Some government agencies argue that it covers mass surveillance of communications rather than just tapping specific lines and that not all CALEA-based access requires a warrant."
    - mminer237 3y ago
      Oh, wow. Wikipedia's statements are uncited so I kinda ignored it, but a DC court did okay that rule even though the statute says it doesn't apply to the Internet. That is worrying. Still it only allows the police to have switches forward packets to them. It doesn't have any ability to decrypt traffic.
ospray 3y ago
I don't understand how they think they can force EU citizens to use only approved browsers. What's to stop anyone who wishes to from using a non EU one and changing the user agent.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  They can't, and nothing. This is all based on the incorrect assumption that they can legislate how software is written, both inside and outside their borders.
- EGreg 3y ago
  Simple, they’ll also mandate that the web sites use WEI and check for approved browsers. They will also lean on software distributors to not distribute unapproved browsers or be fined, jailed or lose their ability to distribute software to Europeans. Think of how they tighten the screws on crypto and end-to-end encryption — same playbook! At every step those that don’t follow the EU’s rules will get fined by the same apparatus as GDPR violators
  - immibis 3y ago
    There is exactly zero evidence or even conjecture to support this.
    - EGreg 3y ago
      Let’s start here to support what I said the UK already DID: https://www.wired.com/story/the-uks-controversial-online-safety-act-is-now-law/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-uks-controversial-online-saf... And here is the rest of the world and the laws they are passing: https://community.qbix.com/t/the-coming-war-on-end-to-end-encryption/214 https://community.qbix.com/t/the-coming-war-on-end-to-end-en...
- cubefox 3y ago
  The companies offering browsers will probably be punished with harsh fees by EU courts if they don't implement things like IP based discrimination. You would get around only with a VPN.
donmcronald 3y ago
> This upper bar on security may even ban browsers from enforcing Certificate Transparency, an IETF technical standard that ensures a CA’s issuing history can be examined by the public in order to detect malfeasance. I don't quite understand that. How does a browser enforce CT? Even if a browser queries CT logs, they're not that helpful without any context, right? How would a browser get anything useful from the logs beyond knowing a certificate was published to the logs? Isn't it the job of the domain owner to monitor those logs since they're the only one that's going to know definitively if a certificate is illegitimate?
- agwa 3y ago
  Browsers enforce Certificate Transparency by rejecting certificates which aren't published in CT logs. A certificate that is published in CT logs isn't necessarily legitimate, but at least it's public so domain owners can detect it and raise the alarm if the certificate is illegitimate. Unfortunately, Article 45 states that certificates issued by EU-mandated CAs "shall not be subject to any mandatory requirements other than the requirements laid down in paragraph 1" and paragraph 1 does not allow browsers to reject certificates not published in CT logs. Thus, EU-mandated CAs will be able to issue undetectable MitM certificates.
  - gcbirzan 3y ago
    Do you happen to have the full text you're referring to? I cannot find that on Google and the one I'm reading says something else. I also couldn't find it on eff's post
    - thedaly 3y ago
      I can't seem to find it anywhere. This line leads me to think it isn't public, which is crazy: > The text isn't final yet, but is subject to approval behind closed doors in Brussels on November 8.
    - agwa 3y ago
      Unfortunately, the text is being drafted in secret and the latest version has not been released publicly. I have seen a leaked copy but I don't have permission to post it. I can attest that the various posts and letters speaking against eIDAS are accurately representing the text. I know this isn't a satisfying answer, but blame the EU for drafting legislation in secret.
hlandau 3y ago
The correct move here is not to try and plead with the EU or do other things which implicitly recognise their authority to make such regulation. The correct move here is to hold such regulations in contempt and expressly refute any claim the EU makes to regulating web browsers as illegitimate. I may as well add that web browsers are generally open source software and their source code thus a form of speech. Recent actions by the EU have made it clear they are trying to start to exert control over web browsers, which they presumably see as prime estate for exerting control over the internet. The correct answer to this is to distribute web browsers from jurisdictions with strong freedom of speech (code) protections, remove any assets from the EU which the EU might try to take hostage to extort compliance, and respond to the EU's frequent attempts to assert "if anyone in the EU uses your product, you have to comply with our rules" with "you and what army."
- immibis 3y ago
  Of course. Nobody's going around arresting people who solder Lightning connectors back into their new iPhones. That isn't how regulations work.
prognu 3y ago
The logical solution for browser vendors is to also roll back the URL bar by 10 years, where we had different indicators for extended validation, normal certificates and plaintext. I guess a blue EU-logo whenever Article-45 compliant CAs are used would make sense. Then we just have to teach people: blue is for "government snoop mode".
- immibis 3y ago
  I thought that was the whole intention of eIDAS. Everyone gets a government approved certificate they can use to sign their websites if they want to, and then the URL bar shows their identity. They don't have to sign websites with their identity, but they have the option to.
- agwa 3y ago
  eIDAS in fact forces browser vendors to do that, but there are two problems with what you're suggesting: 1. Good luck teaching 99% of people to be wary when they see the blue address bar. People generally do not understand address bars, which is a large part of why browsers removed the EV indicator. 2. There is a strong possibility that a future version of eIDAS will force businesses in the EU to get certificates from an eIDAS CA. At that point, people in the EU will be seeing the blue address bar constantly, and most of the time the certificate will in fact be legit.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - prognu 3y ago
    Teaching users is of course the tricky part, and I'm not trying to excuse the insane draft regulation here. That said, eIDAS doesn't force browser vendors to visually distinguish Article 45-forced CA certificates from traditional CAB CA certificates, and I doubt they considered the possibility. So re-adding the distinction is a valid band-aid. Your second point can be addressed relatively easily by businesses getting multiple certificates. Then, the browser can show 'trusted' only if one of the certificates is not from a Article 45-forced CA.
  - 3y ago
phendrenad2 3y ago
This won't stop here. Whoever in the EU government is willing to suffer the bad PR optics of outlawing Firefox, is willing to go further I'd wager. How long before Linux is banned in the EU on personal devices?
- immibis 3y ago
  Can we stop the FUD? Your comment is the equivalent of saying the EU government is willing to outlaw iPhones: No they're not, they're just saying they have to have USB-C charging ports.
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    Perhaps, but USB-C is arguably the equivalent of the Lightning port. Broken TLS is not the functional equivalent of working TLS.
    - immibis 3y ago
      You think if the government issues certificates this breaks TLS? I had no idea it was so fragile. Here's what's happening - the government wants a unified framework for digital identity. They're not saying you have to use it, but they want the framework to be there. Part of the framework is that you can get a certificate with your name on it, signed by the government saying this is officially you, and you can put this on a website to digitally sign the website. Obviously the government-issued certificate is going to have certain parameters, and they want browsers to accept these parameters so these websites will work. How else would you possibly do this, than publishing the certificate parameters and saying browsers must accept these? I don't think they prohibited the browser from saying "this is an EU identity certificate", did they? I imagine it appears as an EV green box showing the person's name and country code. I don't know why I'd ever want that to appear on my website, but I guess some people do.
      - kstrauser 3y ago
        > You think if the government issues certificates this breaks TLS? I had no idea it was so fragile. Nice strawman. The actual situation is that the government wants to require browsers to accept signatures from CAs that the government selects, and ban them from validating the security of the certs signed by those CAs. In other words, they want the ability to be able to issue their own cert for example.com and forbid the browser from telling you that it's signed by a .gov rather than, say, Comodo. With this idiotic, mandated arrangement, it would be impossible for an end user to tell whether they were speaking directly to example.com or to the government's MITM proxy.
vkaku 3y ago
I've talked about TLS before, it is a bane on the Internet in its current form. Here is what users need from any browser that cares about the user: - An option to not use OS supplied root certificates. Instead, to customize and set up user allowed certificates on the first run/first site use. - An easy UI for trusted certificates that give categories and what each certificates scope means. E.g. 'This certificate is issued by a telco provider on behalf of the Government of Canada, is a blanket certificate for all domains, can let the government see all your encrypted traffic.' 'This certificate is issued by the IT department of your organization and let's them see all encrypted traffic' - It should appear as a warning when a user sees these blanket certificates used on general purpose websites (like Google services) and have a way to tell whether there is a potential MITM happening. 'Normally this website would use a certificate provided by Google.com Inc but it seems your Government issued certificate is being used to see all encrypted traffic you are sending to Gmail.com' - Warn meaningfully about algorithm usage choices: 'The algorithm strength is 2048 bits and the year is 2023, and governments already have capable computers that can break this encryption with this strength.'
- Buttons840 3y ago
  > 'This certificate is issued by the IT department of your organization and let's them see all encrypted traffic' I'm a bit out of the loop on modern security implementations. In theory though, I thought the purpose of certificates and certificate authorities was to certify that you're actually talking to who you think you're talking to? A browser can still communicate security with any computer out there, regardless of corporate certs, etc. Or do the corporate firewalls block communications that they cannot inspect?
  - 20after4 3y ago
    TL;DR: The certificate is associated with a private key which can decrypt the traffic for a session established using the cert. The issue is that, given a bogus certificate from a trusted authority, someone can impersonate any site they want, then proxy the traffic to the real site and spy on your session. Longer explanation: If an organization is able to obtain a certificate that the browser trusts, which matches the domain name you are visiting, then they can easily terminate the TLS at the organization's server, then make a new request to the site, where the encrypted session is between the site and the organization's proxy server. They get an effective man-in-the-middle attack and your browser pretends like everything is secure because there is a trusted certificate matching the domain name you visited. The browser doesn't throw up any red flags because it doesn't differentiate between certificates, only certificate authorities. So if a 3rd party can acquire an arbitrary certificate for some domain, and the 3rd party has the private key associated with that cert, and the same 3rd party can intercept the traffic between you and the domain in question, then they can get your traffic in the clear and there are no obvious signs that they did it. Given the current state of TLS and the way browsers deal with certs, the only way for a user to discover that something is amiss is to investigate the details of the cert. Then they might notice that it was issued by a suspicious certificate authority. Unfortunately, the proposed EU law is attempting to prohibit browser vendors from withholding trust (or otherwise scrutinizing) the state-controlled (or state-influenced) certificate authorities, with the intention of preventing browsers from interfering with government's ability to issue illegitimate/insecure (but you must trust them, or else!) certificates.
zlg_codes 3y ago
The Internet is a place where governments have very little power. Even if this passes, it will not affect anyone who cares about hosting things correctly. Governments hide much more from people, and they have much less moral reasov to do so! If anything, it's inside gov't comms that don't deserve protection. Pissbabies mad that they can't spy and want to abuse policy to force it. Good luck reverse engineering math, govs. Y'all can't win this one.
lom 3y ago
This is like the third attempt by the EU to break encryption in a short timespan. This is getting ridiculous.
- immibis 3y ago
  This isn't an attempt to break encryption. Can you show how it is? The EFF has just posted a load of FUD in this article - governments already control CAs, so giving them another one wouldn't give them any new interception capabilities. Actually eIDAS would give them less interception capability, since the browser would have to display some icon saying it's an eIDAS certificate, which it doesn't do for other CAs. Their claims center around "the current language is imprecise" and I'm having a really hard time seeing why that's a problem for a bill that hasn't even finished being written yet.
Puts 3y ago
Isn't this a new Schrems situation? Just because the commission can make a law doesn't mean that it's legal. Seems like it would certainly interfere with the European Convention on Human Rights that grants everyone right to privacy of it's personal life and correspondence – meaning the CJEU would overthrow this law in an instance?
- asadotzler 3y ago
  What are the practical steps to this outcome. Presume this becomes law. Then do we need a person with standing to bring a case? Is there some other mechanism? Does CJEU rule without a case? How does this happen and more importantly, how long does it take. If the process is weeks or months, we may stand a chance. If it's years, the damage will have been done with a generation of compliant (broken) products and hundreds of millions of people deprived of privacy.
charleyablaze 3y ago
Scott Helme has leaked the secret text of Article 45! (scroll down) https://scotthelme.co.uk/what-the-qwac/ https://scotthelme.co.uk/what-the-qwac/
- wkat4242 3y ago
  How the hell is legislation supposed to be secret anyway? How can you even try to obey the law if you can't know what it says...
foota 3y ago
The EU: Google is going to spy on us and sell all our data! Their governments, cackling: Yes, Google is the issue.
mk89 3y ago
Incredible that in 2024 the most downloaded software on bittorrent will be Firefox-US-134.1.exe :)
- anticensor 3y ago
  Firefox-unEIDAS-Iceweasel-134.1.exe /swh
layer8 3y ago
Read the ESD response to the Mozilla statement here: https://www.european-signature-dialog.eu/ESD_experts_support_trilogue_Art.45_results-6nov2023.pdf https://www.european-signature-dialog.eu/ESD_experts_support...
- jsmith45 3y ago
  Much of that response is misleading. It does make a technically correct claim that QWACs are currently accepted by browsers. However, the reality is that QWACs are only accepted by browsers if the issuer fully complies with both CAB Forum baseline requirements, and Root program rules. The entire purpose of the clause in question is effectively to ensure an EU Bureaucracy is responsible for for setting rules instead of CAB Forum and Root programs. Another example it is absolutely true that the eIDAS 2.0 regulars impose some certain weaker security requirements than current browsers. A trivial example is that the response claims QWACs will comply with Brower's Certificate Transparency standards, but those standards are not in the regulation, and the regulation makes it clear that a browser cannot reject QWACS for other reasons not listed in the regulation. Another example, Mozilla has found that CAs who simply request audits done to ETSI standards (the standards imposed by this regulation) will often end up with audits that are incomplete (unable to audit all relevant controls). This can happen for legitimate reasons, but the audit results don't provide enough details here, hence Mozilla added a requirement for an ETSI Audit Attestation Letter (AAL) that explains these limitations. Even worse, once the impediments are no longer in place, by often ETSI auditors do not re-audit the previously un-auditable controls for the last time period. Mozilla needed to impose additional rules including explaining what if any controls could not be audited, and also rules that the next audit must cover previously un-auditable controls for the previously issued audit, in addition to auditing for the that time period. Describing how to do this audits properly within in the ETSI context is complicated because the ETSI audit standards were not really designed to make such rules (Full audit of all controls over all timespans, re-auditing later if some controls could not be evaluated for any reason the first time) easy.
redder23 3y ago
If this passes, I will keep an eye on Browsers and if they actually help people mitigate the problem in some way. Like will not new CAs spawn outside the EU like in Switzerland and sites will begin to advertise they that is a certificate from Switzerland where we have at least a bit more trust in that the EU will not spy on? I am really curious on how this will play out. Will they mandate a certificate for sites that server the EU that they have control over? This is fucking insane. We need some new tech that is decentralized, where they just can't do this kind of thing. Hopefully this spawns something. SSL seems to be outdated and unfit for this job, as this clearly shows.
- yashshah2023 3y ago
  [dead]
dang 3y ago
Related ongoing thread: What the QWAC? an EV Certificate all over again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38183259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38183259 - Nov 2023 (3 comments)
renegat0x0 3y ago
Links about crypto wars, and related: - https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20191223-lotus-notes-nsa-backdoor/ https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20191223-lotus-notes-nsa-ba... - https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/05/us/documents-reveal-nsa-campaign-against-encryption.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013... - https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-interne... - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-rsa-idUSBRE9BJ1C220131220 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-rsa-idUSBRE9... - https://theintercept.com/2015/12/28/recently-bought-a-windows-computer-microsoft-probably-has-your-encryption-key/ https://theintercept.com/2015/12/28/recently-bought-a-window... - https://web.archive.org/web/20160612190952/http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-undercover-war-on-your-internet-secrets-how-online-surveillance-cracked-our-trust-in-the-web/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160612190952/http://www.techre... - https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/01/earn-it-act-how-ban-end-end-encryption-without-actually-banning-it https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/01/earn-it-act-how-b... - https://mailbox.org/en/post/chat-control-the-latest-eu-plans-to-outlaw-encryption-and-introduce-telecommunications-surveillance?nl https://mailbox.org/en/post/chat-control-the-latest-eu-plans... - https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/18/earn-it-act-is-back-and-its-still-terribly-destructive/ https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/18/earn-it-act-is-back-and-... - https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/leaked-eu-files-end-to-end-encryption-spain-ireland-csam https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/leaked-eu-files-e... - https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/06/05/criminalization-of-encryption-the-8-december-case/ https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/06/05/criminalization-o... - https://www.newscientist.com/article/2396510-mathematician-warns-us-spies-may-be-weakening-next-gen-encryption/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2396510-mathematician-w...
RecycledEle 3y ago
I wonder if eIDAS is deliberately made to sound like edas in John Ringo's Legacy of Aldenata books? Edas was a crippling debt that lasted one's whole life that was designed to keep people in slavery.

253 points by agwa 3y ago

frankjr 3y ago

If anything, this shows how absolutely idiotic the whole certificate authority system is.

java-man 3y ago

They never stop trying, don't they?

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Alas, there's just so many people with so many reasons for wanting to grab & coerce the noosphere's thoughpaths to route through their specific power grabs. The move would spring up spontaneously in so many ways. Thanks again EFF for so vigilantly watching against encroachment.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
HPsquared 3y ago
A "no" is temporary; a "yes" is permanent. Is there any way to enact a permanent "no"?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- LightHugger 3y ago
  in the US, constitutional amendments. Not sure about the equivalent in the EU
  - contravariant 3y ago
    Bit trickier in the EU. The countries themselves have constitutions that can be amended, with varying ways in which they can be enforced. In theory this should give sufficient protection, but it becomes a bit complicated if the EU enacts regulations that contradict national laws or even the constitution. The EU derives its power not from a constitution but from its founding treaties. As best I can tell the EU claims these treaties have precedence, but honestly it's a bit unclear how it could overrule the constitutions that gave the signatories the power to ratify the treaties. I do know that the EU wasn't happy when Poland ruled some parts of these treaties unconstitutional (which is really part of a much bigger political fight, but is illustrative).
    - toyg 3y ago
      Most postwar constitutions explicitly allow for transfer of sovereignty to structures necessary to maintain peace among nations. They were originally meant for UN-like organisms and apply equally to the EU.
      - tonyarkles 3y ago
        Canada’s “constitution” explicitly creates a back door right in section 1. I’ve heard Canadian legal scholars comment that the only part of the Charter that would likely completely stand up against a section 1 challenge is section 12: “the right not to be subjected to any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment”
- mminer237 3y ago
  No, any law can be changed. The closest you can come is to make a Constitution hard to change and embed a right to free speech, including encrypted speech, therein. Anything beyond that has to be a cultural conservation.
  - Saline9515 3y ago
    EU laws can't be changed unfortunately. The unelected European Commission is the only one that has the right of initiative.
tomjen3 3y ago
Not when they don't suffer for trying. An unfortunately there is no good way, no technology board of overseers, who takes away their (smart)phone priviledges when they don't behave.
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  Fingerprinting technology could be used to isolate state officials and deny them access based on that 'profile'.

ShakataGaNai 3y ago

It just doesn't make sense to me why anyone tries these things. The reality of the situation would be very obvious. Just because everyone in the EU is in the EU, doesn't make them one big happy family. Do the French want the Germans to be able to spy on their citizens? Seems unlikely. And at a larger scale, the US isn't going to go with that. So the browsers will simply be updated to distrust all of these CA's whom no longer can be trusted and... those EU CA's are out of business. Poof. Hell, if it were reverse you'd see the EU up in arms. "Why should we trust the USA?" - And rightly you shouldn't. That's why Galileo exists. But on the Internet, it doesn't work that way. You can't just do your own thing, lest you kneecap your citizens. How will the Europeans citizens react if their own "free and democratic" governments take away their access to Wikipedia? Or Facebook? Or Tiktok? Using known suspect TLS Certs would also violate basically every B2B contract. When businesses sign contracts for SaaS applications, it involves some verbiage about encryption and best practices and data security in transit and at rest. What business will WANT to sign a deal that says "Yes, it's ok to use a TLS cert that we know our government can intercept" when they have the option to use a cert from someone else that's secure? Cool, shoot your own businesses in the foot too, while you're at it. Freaking politicians. Can't be bothered to do anything about the issues we citizens ACTUALLY want, but instead are too busy meddling in shit that no one wants.

graemep 3y ago
> The reality of the situation would be very obvious. Just because everyone in the EU is in the EU, doesn't make them one big happy family. The EU thinks they should be
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  > The EU thinks I understand that it helps to have a name for something like this, but there is no "EU". "It" cannot think. Heed the Meehan quote; "Men are at war because each man is at war with himself". It's not just that human minds are one psychotic insight away from seeing our dissociative identity disorder just beneath the surface... evey institution and collective is the same. What is wrong in the "EU" (principally the Commission) is that it's large and disparate enough for some extraordinary bad actors to hide within it and exercise undue toxic influence. It is by lack of transparency that they cannot easily be rooted out, named, shamed and dislodged. Meanwhile much of the "EU" functions very well, and cares for its citizens.

extraduder_ire 3y ago

Is there even a reason given for this? Like, why it might be a good idea to enforce?

buildbot 3y ago

How does CALEA work in the USA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...) Does it fail on HTTPS communications or is a similar "rogue" CA that allows law enforcement to decrypt traffic as they need?

TheIronMark 3y ago
I don't believe CALEA has any provisions for requiring CA providers to allow decrypt.
- buildbot 3y ago
  Thanks!
mminer237 3y ago
It doesn't really have anything to do with the Internet. CALEA only applies to phone calls. VoIP calls are only encrypted to and from the carrier, so they can tap them there with pre-existing telephony hardware if they have a warrant to do so.
- buildbot 3y ago
  It applies to broadband, in the second paragraph of the wikipedia article: "it has since been extended to cover broadband Internet and VoIP traffic. Some government agencies argue that it covers mass surveillance of communications rather than just tapping specific lines and that not all CALEA-based access requires a warrant."
  - mminer237 3y ago
    Oh, wow. Wikipedia's statements are uncited so I kinda ignored it, but a DC court did okay that rule even though the statute says it doesn't apply to the Internet. That is worrying. Still it only allows the police to have switches forward packets to them. It doesn't have any ability to decrypt traffic.

ospray 3y ago

I don't understand how they think they can force EU citizens to use only approved browsers. What's to stop anyone who wishes to from using a non EU one and changing the user agent.

kstrauser 3y ago
They can't, and nothing. This is all based on the incorrect assumption that they can legislate how software is written, both inside and outside their borders.
EGreg 3y ago
Simple, they’ll also mandate that the web sites use WEI and check for approved browsers. They will also lean on software distributors to not distribute unapproved browsers or be fined, jailed or lose their ability to distribute software to Europeans. Think of how they tighten the screws on crypto and end-to-end encryption — same playbook! At every step those that don’t follow the EU’s rules will get fined by the same apparatus as GDPR violators
- immibis 3y ago
  There is exactly zero evidence or even conjecture to support this.
  - EGreg 3y ago
    Let’s start here to support what I said the UK already DID: https://www.wired.com/story/the-uks-controversial-online-safety-act-is-now-law/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-uks-controversial-online-saf... And here is the rest of the world and the laws they are passing: https://community.qbix.com/t/the-coming-war-on-end-to-end-encryption/214 https://community.qbix.com/t/the-coming-war-on-end-to-end-en...
cubefox 3y ago
The companies offering browsers will probably be punished with harsh fees by EU courts if they don't implement things like IP based discrimination. You would get around only with a VPN.

donmcronald 3y ago

> This upper bar on security may even ban browsers from enforcing Certificate Transparency, an IETF technical standard that ensures a CA’s issuing history can be examined by the public in order to detect malfeasance. I don't quite understand that. How does a browser enforce CT? Even if a browser queries CT logs, they're not that helpful without any context, right? How would a browser get anything useful from the logs beyond knowing a certificate was published to the logs? Isn't it the job of the domain owner to monitor those logs since they're the only one that's going to know definitively if a certificate is illegitimate?

agwa 3y ago
Browsers enforce Certificate Transparency by rejecting certificates which aren't published in CT logs. A certificate that is published in CT logs isn't necessarily legitimate, but at least it's public so domain owners can detect it and raise the alarm if the certificate is illegitimate. Unfortunately, Article 45 states that certificates issued by EU-mandated CAs "shall not be subject to any mandatory requirements other than the requirements laid down in paragraph 1" and paragraph 1 does not allow browsers to reject certificates not published in CT logs. Thus, EU-mandated CAs will be able to issue undetectable MitM certificates.
- gcbirzan 3y ago
  Do you happen to have the full text you're referring to? I cannot find that on Google and the one I'm reading says something else. I also couldn't find it on eff's post
  - thedaly 3y ago
    I can't seem to find it anywhere. This line leads me to think it isn't public, which is crazy: > The text isn't final yet, but is subject to approval behind closed doors in Brussels on November 8.
  - agwa 3y ago
    Unfortunately, the text is being drafted in secret and the latest version has not been released publicly. I have seen a leaked copy but I don't have permission to post it. I can attest that the various posts and letters speaking against eIDAS are accurately representing the text. I know this isn't a satisfying answer, but blame the EU for drafting legislation in secret.

hlandau 3y ago

The correct move here is not to try and plead with the EU or do other things which implicitly recognise their authority to make such regulation. The correct move here is to hold such regulations in contempt and expressly refute any claim the EU makes to regulating web browsers as illegitimate. I may as well add that web browsers are generally open source software and their source code thus a form of speech. Recent actions by the EU have made it clear they are trying to start to exert control over web browsers, which they presumably see as prime estate for exerting control over the internet. The correct answer to this is to distribute web browsers from jurisdictions with strong freedom of speech (code) protections, remove any assets from the EU which the EU might try to take hostage to extort compliance, and respond to the EU's frequent attempts to assert "if anyone in the EU uses your product, you have to comply with our rules" with "you and what army."

immibis 3y ago
Of course. Nobody's going around arresting people who solder Lightning connectors back into their new iPhones. That isn't how regulations work.

prognu 3y ago

The logical solution for browser vendors is to also roll back the URL bar by 10 years, where we had different indicators for extended validation, normal certificates and plaintext. I guess a blue EU-logo whenever Article-45 compliant CAs are used would make sense. Then we just have to teach people: blue is for "government snoop mode".

immibis 3y ago
I thought that was the whole intention of eIDAS. Everyone gets a government approved certificate they can use to sign their websites if they want to, and then the URL bar shows their identity. They don't have to sign websites with their identity, but they have the option to.
agwa 3y ago
eIDAS in fact forces browser vendors to do that, but there are two problems with what you're suggesting: 1. Good luck teaching 99% of people to be wary when they see the blue address bar. People generally do not understand address bars, which is a large part of why browsers removed the EV indicator. 2. There is a strong possibility that a future version of eIDAS will force businesses in the EU to get certificates from an eIDAS CA. At that point, people in the EU will be seeing the blue address bar constantly, and most of the time the certificate will in fact be legit.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- prognu 3y ago
  Teaching users is of course the tricky part, and I'm not trying to excuse the insane draft regulation here. That said, eIDAS doesn't force browser vendors to visually distinguish Article 45-forced CA certificates from traditional CAB CA certificates, and I doubt they considered the possibility. So re-adding the distinction is a valid band-aid. Your second point can be addressed relatively easily by businesses getting multiple certificates. Then, the browser can show 'trusted' only if one of the certificates is not from a Article 45-forced CA.
- 3y ago

phendrenad2 3y ago

This won't stop here. Whoever in the EU government is willing to suffer the bad PR optics of outlawing Firefox, is willing to go further I'd wager. How long before Linux is banned in the EU on personal devices?

immibis 3y ago
Can we stop the FUD? Your comment is the equivalent of saying the EU government is willing to outlaw iPhones: No they're not, they're just saying they have to have USB-C charging ports.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  Perhaps, but USB-C is arguably the equivalent of the Lightning port. Broken TLS is not the functional equivalent of working TLS.
  - immibis 3y ago
    You think if the government issues certificates this breaks TLS? I had no idea it was so fragile. Here's what's happening - the government wants a unified framework for digital identity. They're not saying you have to use it, but they want the framework to be there. Part of the framework is that you can get a certificate with your name on it, signed by the government saying this is officially you, and you can put this on a website to digitally sign the website. Obviously the government-issued certificate is going to have certain parameters, and they want browsers to accept these parameters so these websites will work. How else would you possibly do this, than publishing the certificate parameters and saying browsers must accept these? I don't think they prohibited the browser from saying "this is an EU identity certificate", did they? I imagine it appears as an EV green box showing the person's name and country code. I don't know why I'd ever want that to appear on my website, but I guess some people do.
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      > You think if the government issues certificates this breaks TLS? I had no idea it was so fragile. Nice strawman. The actual situation is that the government wants to require browsers to accept signatures from CAs that the government selects, and ban them from validating the security of the certs signed by those CAs. In other words, they want the ability to be able to issue their own cert for example.com and forbid the browser from telling you that it's signed by a .gov rather than, say, Comodo. With this idiotic, mandated arrangement, it would be impossible for an end user to tell whether they were speaking directly to example.com or to the government's MITM proxy.

vkaku 3y ago

I've talked about TLS before, it is a bane on the Internet in its current form. Here is what users need from any browser that cares about the user: - An option to not use OS supplied root certificates. Instead, to customize and set up user allowed certificates on the first run/first site use. - An easy UI for trusted certificates that give categories and what each certificates scope means. E.g. 'This certificate is issued by a telco provider on behalf of the Government of Canada, is a blanket certificate for all domains, can let the government see all your encrypted traffic.' 'This certificate is issued by the IT department of your organization and let's them see all encrypted traffic' - It should appear as a warning when a user sees these blanket certificates used on general purpose websites (like Google services) and have a way to tell whether there is a potential MITM happening. 'Normally this website would use a certificate provided by Google.com Inc but it seems your Government issued certificate is being used to see all encrypted traffic you are sending to Gmail.com' - Warn meaningfully about algorithm usage choices: 'The algorithm strength is 2048 bits and the year is 2023, and governments already have capable computers that can break this encryption with this strength.'

Buttons840 3y ago
> 'This certificate is issued by the IT department of your organization and let's them see all encrypted traffic' I'm a bit out of the loop on modern security implementations. In theory though, I thought the purpose of certificates and certificate authorities was to certify that you're actually talking to who you think you're talking to? A browser can still communicate security with any computer out there, regardless of corporate certs, etc. Or do the corporate firewalls block communications that they cannot inspect?
- 20after4 3y ago
  TL;DR: The certificate is associated with a private key which can decrypt the traffic for a session established using the cert. The issue is that, given a bogus certificate from a trusted authority, someone can impersonate any site they want, then proxy the traffic to the real site and spy on your session. Longer explanation: If an organization is able to obtain a certificate that the browser trusts, which matches the domain name you are visiting, then they can easily terminate the TLS at the organization's server, then make a new request to the site, where the encrypted session is between the site and the organization's proxy server. They get an effective man-in-the-middle attack and your browser pretends like everything is secure because there is a trusted certificate matching the domain name you visited. The browser doesn't throw up any red flags because it doesn't differentiate between certificates, only certificate authorities. So if a 3rd party can acquire an arbitrary certificate for some domain, and the 3rd party has the private key associated with that cert, and the same 3rd party can intercept the traffic between you and the domain in question, then they can get your traffic in the clear and there are no obvious signs that they did it. Given the current state of TLS and the way browsers deal with certs, the only way for a user to discover that something is amiss is to investigate the details of the cert. Then they might notice that it was issued by a suspicious certificate authority. Unfortunately, the proposed EU law is attempting to prohibit browser vendors from withholding trust (or otherwise scrutinizing) the state-controlled (or state-influenced) certificate authorities, with the intention of preventing browsers from interfering with government's ability to issue illegitimate/insecure (but you must trust them, or else!) certificates.

zlg_codes 3y ago

The Internet is a place where governments have very little power. Even if this passes, it will not affect anyone who cares about hosting things correctly. Governments hide much more from people, and they have much less moral reasov to do so! If anything, it's inside gov't comms that don't deserve protection. Pissbabies mad that they can't spy and want to abuse policy to force it. Good luck reverse engineering math, govs. Y'all can't win this one.

lom 3y ago

This is like the third attempt by the EU to break encryption in a short timespan. This is getting ridiculous.

immibis 3y ago
This isn't an attempt to break encryption. Can you show how it is? The EFF has just posted a load of FUD in this article - governments already control CAs, so giving them another one wouldn't give them any new interception capabilities. Actually eIDAS would give them less interception capability, since the browser would have to display some icon saying it's an eIDAS certificate, which it doesn't do for other CAs. Their claims center around "the current language is imprecise" and I'm having a really hard time seeing why that's a problem for a bill that hasn't even finished being written yet.

Puts 3y ago

Isn't this a new Schrems situation? Just because the commission can make a law doesn't mean that it's legal. Seems like it would certainly interfere with the European Convention on Human Rights that grants everyone right to privacy of it's personal life and correspondence – meaning the CJEU would overthrow this law in an instance?

asadotzler 3y ago
What are the practical steps to this outcome. Presume this becomes law. Then do we need a person with standing to bring a case? Is there some other mechanism? Does CJEU rule without a case? How does this happen and more importantly, how long does it take. If the process is weeks or months, we may stand a chance. If it's years, the damage will have been done with a generation of compliant (broken) products and hundreds of millions of people deprived of privacy.

charleyablaze 3y ago

Scott Helme has leaked the secret text of Article 45! (scroll down) https://scotthelme.co.uk/what-the-qwac/ https://scotthelme.co.uk/what-the-qwac/

wkat4242 3y ago
How the hell is legislation supposed to be secret anyway? How can you even try to obey the law if you can't know what it says...

foota 3y ago

The EU: Google is going to spy on us and sell all our data! Their governments, cackling: Yes, Google is the issue.

mk89 3y ago

Incredible that in 2024 the most downloaded software on bittorrent will be Firefox-US-134.1.exe :)

anticensor 3y ago
Firefox-unEIDAS-Iceweasel-134.1.exe /swh

layer8 3y ago

Read the ESD response to the Mozilla statement here: https://www.european-signature-dialog.eu/ESD_experts_support_trilogue_Art.45_results-6nov2023.pdf https://www.european-signature-dialog.eu/ESD_experts_support...

jsmith45 3y ago
Much of that response is misleading. It does make a technically correct claim that QWACs are currently accepted by browsers. However, the reality is that QWACs are only accepted by browsers if the issuer fully complies with both CAB Forum baseline requirements, and Root program rules. The entire purpose of the clause in question is effectively to ensure an EU Bureaucracy is responsible for for setting rules instead of CAB Forum and Root programs. Another example it is absolutely true that the eIDAS 2.0 regulars impose some certain weaker security requirements than current browsers. A trivial example is that the response claims QWACs will comply with Brower's Certificate Transparency standards, but those standards are not in the regulation, and the regulation makes it clear that a browser cannot reject QWACS for other reasons not listed in the regulation. Another example, Mozilla has found that CAs who simply request audits done to ETSI standards (the standards imposed by this regulation) will often end up with audits that are incomplete (unable to audit all relevant controls). This can happen for legitimate reasons, but the audit results don't provide enough details here, hence Mozilla added a requirement for an ETSI Audit Attestation Letter (AAL) that explains these limitations. Even worse, once the impediments are no longer in place, by often ETSI auditors do not re-audit the previously un-auditable controls for the last time period. Mozilla needed to impose additional rules including explaining what if any controls could not be audited, and also rules that the next audit must cover previously un-auditable controls for the previously issued audit, in addition to auditing for the that time period. Describing how to do this audits properly within in the ETSI context is complicated because the ETSI audit standards were not really designed to make such rules (Full audit of all controls over all timespans, re-auditing later if some controls could not be evaluated for any reason the first time) easy.

redder23 3y ago

If this passes, I will keep an eye on Browsers and if they actually help people mitigate the problem in some way. Like will not new CAs spawn outside the EU like in Switzerland and sites will begin to advertise they that is a certificate from Switzerland where we have at least a bit more trust in that the EU will not spy on? I am really curious on how this will play out. Will they mandate a certificate for sites that server the EU that they have control over? This is fucking insane. We need some new tech that is decentralized, where they just can't do this kind of thing. Hopefully this spawns something. SSL seems to be outdated and unfit for this job, as this clearly shows.

yashshah2023 3y ago
[dead]

dang 3y ago

Related ongoing thread: What the QWAC? an EV Certificate all over again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38183259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38183259 - Nov 2023 (3 comments)

renegat0x0 3y ago

Links about crypto wars, and related: - https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20191223-lotus-notes-nsa-backdoor/ https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20191223-lotus-notes-nsa-ba... - https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/05/us/documents-reveal-nsa-campaign-against-encryption.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013... - https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-interne... - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-rsa-idUSBRE9BJ1C220131220 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-rsa-idUSBRE9... - https://theintercept.com/2015/12/28/recently-bought-a-windows-computer-microsoft-probably-has-your-encryption-key/ https://theintercept.com/2015/12/28/recently-bought-a-window... - https://web.archive.org/web/20160612190952/http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-undercover-war-on-your-internet-secrets-how-online-surveillance-cracked-our-trust-in-the-web/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160612190952/http://www.techre... - https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/01/earn-it-act-how-ban-end-end-encryption-without-actually-banning-it https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/01/earn-it-act-how-b... - https://mailbox.org/en/post/chat-control-the-latest-eu-plans-to-outlaw-encryption-and-introduce-telecommunications-surveillance?nl https://mailbox.org/en/post/chat-control-the-latest-eu-plans... - https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/18/earn-it-act-is-back-and-its-still-terribly-destructive/ https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/18/earn-it-act-is-back-and-... - https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/leaked-eu-files-end-to-end-encryption-spain-ireland-csam https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/leaked-eu-files-e... - https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/06/05/criminalization-of-encryption-the-8-december-case/ https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/06/05/criminalization-o... - https://www.newscientist.com/article/2396510-mathematician-warns-us-spies-may-be-weakening-next-gen-encryption/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2396510-mathematician-w...

RecycledEle 3y ago

I wonder if eIDAS is deliberately made to sound like edas in John Ringo's Legacy of Aldenata books? Edas was a crippling debt that lasted one's whole life that was designed to keep people in slavery.