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…

  • sonymegadrive@feddit.ukEnglish
    5·
    10 months ago

    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!

    • CrabLangEnjoyer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      10 months ago

      The government CA could just issue a new certificate for let’s say Google, force your ISP to return a wrong IP when you ask your ISPs dns server what the address of Google is and then return a fake Google page instead or forward traffic to Google on your behalf and read all data. And since your browser trusts the new fake Google certificate from the government you won’t get any https error or warning.

    • krigo666@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      10 months ago

      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.

    • vagabond@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      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.