this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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EU Article 45 requires that browsers trust certificate authorities appointed by governments (www.eff.org)
submitted 1 year ago by L4s to c/technology
110 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

Maybe I misunderstand what you're saying, but since the wide majority of EU citizens use their ISP's DNS, it's trivial for them to mandate a domain redirection to another server which would act as a proxy of the original (and thus only need the original server's public key).

So far, the only protection we have against that are:

  1. Changing DNS (WAY too complicated for the average user, also brings the DNS' own contry's censorship)
  2. The fact that they wouldn't have a valid certificate for it because any sensible CA would see it for what it is: a MITM.

That's why, to my understanding, this is such a big deal. At any point, ANY EU gov (and I want to emphasis that part because ot's important in the context of tjhs law) can request a change of DNS from their ISP's DNS (many already do right now) and emit a fully trusted certificate for the domain they want to MITM.

[–] slock 2 points 1 year ago

It is also a huge deal because since (at least in France) the government forced ISPs to log DNS queries, a lot of browsers (and latest android and iOSversion's) have now migrated to DNS over https or TLS DNS, which means that the only clear text DNS query they can intercept is the one to fetch your secure DNS service address. Now, having a trusted CA installed in browsers means that they can also spoof the identity of this secure name service, and regain a bit of control.

They invested a lot in surveillance technology (for both good and bad reasons), and https, DNS and encrypted messaging / phone calls means this was all for nothing.

And yes, by being authorized as a trusted CA, you can effectively spoof pretty much anything by setting a proxy. Some tools even leverage this for app analysis. Look up mitmproxy for example, or squid. A lot of companies already do this to inspect inbound / outbound traffic.