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- cross-posted to:
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EU Article 45 requires that browsers trust certificate authorities appointed by governments::The EU is poised to pass a sweeping new regulation, eIDAS 2.0. Buried deep in the text is Article 45, which returns us to the dark ages of 2011, when certificate authorities (CAs) could collaborate with governments to spy on encrypted traffic—and get away with it. Article 45 forbids browsers from…
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What the fuck is EU doing? Why are they trying so hard to participate in the enshitification effort?
Great and in 2 -3 years we find out, that someone has actively abused this security hole for years and stole whatever master key is required, to create their own fake government CA and has been spying on everyone for years. Or political opposition was imprisoned before they could act. Best is, such man in the middle attacks allow for all sorts of things, including putting fake evidence on your computer.
Oh yes, no one would ever do that every, totally never happened and won’t. Nazis will also never come back. What, they soon are the biggest party in Germany, in other countries too? And will dictate rules in the EU? No one could see that happening…
Where there’s honey, there will be bears.
I just hope we can create a browser plugin to deny gov CAs automatically or a browser from outside EU to block that shit. …until your ISP is forced by law to block traffic from these.
One step closer to a great EU firewall and it sucks. Good old salami tactics. Because at some point it doesn’t even matter if there are ways to mitigate this spying, if the alternative are so complicated and uncomfortable to use, that 99,999% of the people won’t bother.
Commercial CAs are not that better either
Companies always have a name and money to lose and are a hurdle for overreaching hands. The government has no reputation nor money to lose and a simple agreement opens all doors if it’s already government owned. A big difference to me personally.
The government should only ever own things that would fail or be worse, if in public hands. Like infrastructure for instance.
Absolutely don’t agree that companies are more trustworthy than governments.
My guess is that you have an awful government in your home country, but not here. And yes that could change, but they are at least voteable.
Companies are the scum of this world.
Nazis will also never come back. What, they soon are the biggest party in Germany, in other countries too?
Calling AfD Nazis is an exaggeration watering down the term.
I’m not saying actual honest-to-God Nazis are not coming back. In fact, I’m sure they are, no evil is ever defeated forever. Time to cast away stones and time to collect stones.
Calling AfD Nazis is an exaggeration watering down the term.
The Verfassungsschutz (Office for Protection of the Constitution) classified the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt as right-wing extremists just last Tuseday. A year before that the AfD Thuringia was classified similarly by the respective Landesverfassungsschutz (State’s Office for Protection of the Cnstitution), but was reclassified a level just before that as a suspected extremist right-wing party by the federal constitution protection office. The AfD-Juniors (“Junge Alternative”) were classified as right-wing extremists last April by the Verfassungsschutz.
They regularly catch ones attention with antisemitic, xenophobic statements at best and inhumane, anti-democratic sentiments at worst.
Considering that they start to get more and more political posts on a communal level, and remembering that the communal political landscape played a pivotal role for the rise of the NSDAP (I would provide a source, but it’s in German) I would certainly say that’s something to be very worried about.
I don’t know what else you need. They speak like Nazis, they act like Nazis. They are Nazis. Just because they haven’t reached that level of political power to set Jews and foreigners on fire again, doesn’t mean they are harmless or that calling them out for what they are would “water down the term ‘Nazi’”.
AfD in Saxony-Anhalt
Yes, I’ve heard of that. I’ve also heard that they vary much in, eh, ideological climate in different states. So - it may be just a result of them being a populist party.
I would provide a source, but it’s in German
That’d be fine, I can’t write and speak in German, but a wee bit better at understanding texts.
They speak like Nazis,
Not really, I’ve actually took a lot of interest in how Nazis really spoke when I was 15 years old. It was a weird time in my life, so wanted to know more closely things surely known to be evil and good to recognize evil and good in my surroundings.
(Thinking of Klemperer’s book.)
“Antisemitic and xenophobic” statements are not limited to Nazis, while some specifically Nazi traits of speech I can see being more popular, but really not limited to AfD and the likes. Even here one can encounter such.
they act like Nazis.
I don’t think they’ve started killing their opponents on the streets yet, or forming paramilitary groups.
doesn’t mean they are harmless or that calling them out for what they are would “water down the term ‘Nazi’”
You may be right, but parties and entities more similar to Nazis in other parts of the world usually were pretty open about their intentions from the very beginning, while AfD doesn’t send the same signals.
So - it may be just a result of them being a populist party.
As far as I can see it, this is spreading.
Regarding the source, here is one I was thinking about earlier:
Eine besagt, daß vor 1933 sowohl im Deutschen Reich als auch in Thüringen für alle Bemühungen der Nazis gerade die kommunale Ebene eine bedeutsame Rolle gespielt hat.
From: https://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/ls_thueringen/2007_Weißbecker_Kommunalpolitik_NSDAP.pdf page 2.
Regarding the remaining part of your reply:
It seems that you understand Nazis in a form when they were already at a state of having considerable amount of power. I understand Nazis already on a mere ideological level, that’s why I see a lot of similarities between Nazis back then when they were just starting out, and those Neo-Nazis now who come in several colours and shapes. And especially the AfD seems to be a magnet for those extremists.“Antisemitic and xenophobic” statements are not limited to Nazis
Yes of course not. This is just another exemplary piece of the whole image.
I don’t think they’ve started killing their opponents on the streets yet, or forming paramilitary groups.
As I said before, they haven’t reached that level of power yet. Besides that:
The politician Wolfgang Lübcke was killed by a right-wing extremist who had ties to the AfD. Even though - in all macabre “fairness” - the party is not responsible for that, this again shows a severe lack of distancing from right-wing extremism within the party.
Then there is the “Reichsbürger” (citizen of the Reich) milieu, against whom police raids were conducted where plans to overthrow the government were revealed and a over 100 weapons were confiscated. This is not the AfD, yes. But here again, a lot of AfD members seem to tolerate or even downplay this (see for example this article). And let’s not forget how a AfD politician gave tours to Reichsbürger-members through the government disctrict in preparation of them planning to storm the Bundestag.
Even (former) AfD members criticize their (former) party and make comparisons with the NSDAP, like a former AfD city councillor.Let’s deal with this here:
They speak like Nazis,
Not really
Oh boy, I can give you many many many examples. But let’s take one promiment one, since I’ve already written a lot: The floor leader of the AfD Thuringia, Björn Höcke, got his immunity lifted several times and against whom a criminal process is currently running for demagoguery and using the SA (Sturmabteilung of the NSDAP) slogan “Alles für Deutschland”. (Since there are several articles about that and is also listed on wikipedia, you can easily find according sources yourself, but I’ll leave you one article on that here for your convenience: Björn Höckes Immunität erneut aufgehoben .) There is so much more regarding his views and what he said, which makes it hard for me to not see him as a Nazi.
Nazis in other parts of the world usually were pretty open about their intentions from the very beginning, while AfD doesn’t send the same signals
Maybe a slightly deeper dive into AfD talk might change your mind ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--UWifFi978 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YCScM7qd8g ). That’s were our experiences seem to differ. It’s a slow process, but there are many problematic signals (and as time goes on we get more and more of them) which show that the AfD are becoming a serious problem if they don’t start to fight against extremists within their own party. The NSDAP didn’t start sterilizing disabled people from day one either.
A party tolerating Nazis in their ranks is not worth differentiating from a party made entirely out of Nazis.
Ya know, if politicians have Himmler’s instruction to produce more “aryan” babies hanging in their bedroom as a poster, it is safe to say it’s a Nazi party.
Anything is worth differentiating from a thing which is, well, different from it.
Kemalists are not the same as Young Turks, for example (however, saying that Kemal and Kemalists are not a direct continuation of Young Turks for all intents and purposes is something only a clueless European would do, trying to whitewash them because Kemalist Turkey joined NATO early).
This is really bad. This is the EU taking a page out of the books of Russia, Iran, and the PRC by implementing website blocking and government-issued CAs. Europeans could be at real risk in the event of a democratic backslide.
That’s usually my way to evaluate if a government should have a power. I ask myself if the other side were in charge and had this power, would it be really bad? If the answer is yes, more than likely the government shouldn’t have that power.
Congrats, you are smarter than most people talking about regulations.
You know, they are not being autocratic, it’s for people’s own good, to protect children and other “random bullshit go!” things.
Unless we act, we’re doomed. This is the new “nobles and clergymen”, only it’s “riches and beurocrats”.
Capitalism is just feudalism in new clothes. 😓
Serfs in Gucci belts.
Ah, who am I kidding? Serfs had a far better work/life balance than most people in the developed world today. They had to use regular belts, though, which is embarrassing.
The reason they had more days off wasn’t so they could watch Netflix it was because to survive they needed to do a lot of long and heavy chores.
If you want to live the life of an illiterate subsistance farmer wearing rough jute clothes and drinking nasty ale made with dirty water and reed sugar then you can just do that.
It was meant as a joke. Capitalism isn’t feudalism in new cloths, either, but that gets a pass. I think you just hate ducks.
Besides, serfdom went on for centuries, under hundreds of different lords and rulers, in just as many environments. Your description covers one type, not all types. It’s disingenuous to paint it black and white, just because you have a problem with ducks.
What a fucking nightmare. And I thought the US was bad about trying to encroach more on privacy.
Am thinking this looks like a nightmare but their intentions are actually different. However giving any kind of power to government is almost universally bad idea since it’s guaranteed to be abused, no matter the initial reason it was added.
Where and how do we complain? This is really bad…
knowing that EU commission is full of IT “campers” waiting to reimburse their mortgage and they will probably outsource the work to india (despite being forbidden), i am not really fond of the idea.
“camper”?
That means cryptographic keys under one government’s control could be used to intercept HTTPS communication
Could someone smarter than me explain how this would be possible? Wouldn’t the browser still be able to enforce privacy between the client and origin? Or is it the case that certificates issued by these CAs could in theory only support weaker cyphers?
Edit: Some really useful explanations. Thank you!
There can be an infinite amount of certificates for a single domain.
When you setup a connection to a website you basically get a response back that has been signed with a certificate.
Your Browser / OS has a list of certification authorities that it deems trustworthy.
So when you get the response the browser checks if the certificate was issued by a trusted CA.
Now, if the EU forces browsers to trust their CA they can facilitate a man-in-the-middle attack.
In this instance they will intercept the TLS Handshake and give you back a response that was signed by their certificate. Your Browser deems the certificate valid and sets up a secure tunnel to the EUs Server.
From then on they can forward packets between you and the real website while being able to read everything in cleartext
Cryptography works. At least until sufficiently powerful quantum computers arrive, TLS reliably ensures confidentiality between your browser and the server. No one else can snoop on the data transmitted via that connection.
But are you connected to the right server? Without some kind of authentication, any adversary in the middle (such as your ISP) could impersonate the real server.
That is where certificates come in. They are issued by neutral certificate authorities (CAs) that check the identity. It works something like this:
- I, the server operator, create a private key on that server. I use that key to create a certificate request which asks the CA to give me a certificate. This request also contains the domain names for which the key shall be used.
- The CA performs identity checks.
- The CA issues me the certificate. I install it on my server. Now, when browsers create a TLS connection I can tell them: here’s my public key you can use to check my identity, and here’s a certificate that shows that this is a valid key for this domain name!
- The browser will validate the certificate and see if the domain name matches one of the names in the certificate.
What kind of checks are done depends on the CA. I’ve obtained certificates by appearing in person at a counter, showing my government ID, and filling out a form. Nowadays more common is the ACME protocol which enables automated certificate issuance. With ACME, the CA connects to the server from multiple network locations (making interception unlikely) and checks if the server provides a certain authentication token.
To know which certificates are valid, browsers must know which CAs are trusted. Browser makers and CAs have come together to create an evolving standard of minimum requirements that CAs must fulfill to be eligible for inclusion in the browser’s default trust store. If a CA violates this (for example by creating certificates that can be used for government traffic interception, or by creating a certificate without announcing it in a public transparency list), then future browser versions will remove them, making all their certificates worthless.
eIDAS 2 has the effect of circumventing all of this. There is to be a government-controlled CA (already high-risk) that has its own verification rules set by legislation (does not meet industry standard rules). And browsers would be legally forced to include the eIDAS CAs as “trusted”.
This puts browsers in a tough spot because they’ve resisted these kinds of requests from authoritarian regimes in the past. But now the world’s largest trade bloc is asking. Browsers can comply or leave the EU market, or maybe provide a less secure EU edition? Awakens uncomfortable memories around the failed US attempts at cryptography export control (cryptography is considered a munition, like hand grenades or ballistic missiles).
It is plausible that the EU is doing this with good intentions: having a digital identity scheme is useful, it makes sense for identity to be government-controlled (like passports), and such a scheme will only see success if it sees industry adoption. The EU has also seen that hoping for voluntary industry adoption doesn’t generally work, e.g. see the USB-C mandate.
A government could create a new certificate for any domain without having ownership of the domain or permission of the owner. This way they can perform Man-in-the-middle attacks.
In such an attack someone intercepts the traffic of a client and presents their own certificate.
Because a government can create a universally accepted certificate, thise would be accepted as valid. The traffic can then be decrypted and forwarded to the real website. The attacker is now between the client and the real host (the Man in the middle) and can view the unencrypted traffic.
The CA (Certification Authority) is what validates the encryption certificates that TLS uses in HTTPS. In this case it can certify a cypher that can be used in a site’s certificates and be known to a government agency (the 3rd party) and used to decrypt the HTTPS stream. This basically an Man-In-The-Middle attack.
When a website uses HTTPS they have a certificate that proves who they are. Your device uses that certificate to encrypt your data so that only that service can decrypt it. The issue is that it’s just a file and anyone can make one. So to determine whether I trust your certificate I need it to be cryptographically signed by someone I already trust. These are the certificate authorities.
If I was a certificate authority that your device trusts then I could create a certificate for any domain and your device would believe me. Meaning I could sit between you and any web service and have you encrypt things with my certificate in a way that lets me decrypt everything before forwarding it to the service and you would never know.
Oh HELL NO
That’s some bullshit.
Jesus, this is not about spaying. This is because browsers have history of sucking at trusting new certificate authorities.
In Spain you get private certificate on your ID. You can use this ID to sing documents and access government pages. Those certificates are signed and provided by the government institution responsible for printing money (Royal Mint). It took them like 10 years to get the root cert added to the main browsers so that people could authenticate using those certs on government pages. It still doesn’t work very well and I have to manually trust certs on Linux. I think I don’t have to explain why being able to identify yourself on govt pages would be great.
What’s the security risk here? People really think that the Spanish spy agency would request certs signed by the Royal Mint for 3rd party domain and use those for MITM attack? When they are caught this would raise huuuuge stink, Spanish govt certs would get banned and Royal Mint would lose all credibility. I’m not saying they are definitely not stupid enough to try it but they would only be able to do it once.
They wouldn’t get banned. That’s the problem. The article mandates that these certificates are exempt from the usual repercussions for acting out
I’m not saying they are definitely not stupid enough to try it but they would only be able to do it once.
They will the caught and they will do it again and again. Normies they don’t give a fuck about privacy or certificates.
Just a heads up: new wording has killed this.
No it hasn’t, not even slightly.
Nice clickbait title, man…
It’s still a proposal for now.
History of the EU has shown that proposals become directives unless enough people make a stink. This is the stink.
No, EFF that’s linked here is doing a good job.
OP is just using shitty titles to stir up drama.
For now…
