Article 45 Will Roll Back Web Security by 12 Years
www.eff.org
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...

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…

  • DacoTaco@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Id need to read the whole law ( as we all should if we were to discuss it ), but everyone says trust the certificate, etc.
    We can trust the certificate, but if the hostname does not match the certificate’s domains, you can ( and should ) deny it. Law doesnt say to trust the connection if a parameter is wrong, it says that browsers should consider certs provided by the government CA to be legit.

    The only mitm that can be done is at the server itself or in a website pretending to be the requested server. But for this to work you need to have the private and public keys of the server you want to act like.

    … Aka, government can read your data just as easily as facebook, google, pornhub or whatever.

    The only thing this changes is that a government can easily issue a new cert without having to wait, and deal with e-ids easier.

    As a european i have very mixed feelings about the new law, but the reactions are ,imo, a bit overrated because there is a lot more factors that go into secure connections than just the cert

    • pandacoder@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      The problem is that you can issue two certificates for one domain from two different CAs. Which one is valid?

      If you only have one of the certificates, you also can’t know that another exists to warn the user that they might be connecting to a government-operated middleman.

      The problem with a government issued CA being trusted is that the government can now issue whatever certificates they want for any website, and then all they need to do is force your traffic to pass through their servers first.

      And no they don’t even need to make fake website clones, they have you connect to their proxy server which has a valid cert, then they have everything plaintext to save off to look at, and they forward the connection to the original website. Reverse proxy servers to accomplish this take minutes to set up.