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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

This title is clickbait. The proposed amendment to the framework is just excessively bureaucratic around the management of cert authorities. This might potentially result in browsers accepting certificates from authorities with a slightly dubious track record (according to browser vendors), yes, but the certificates themselves will not necessarily be "less secure" - which the layman typically interprets as "cryptographically weaker".

In practice, this would simply move a little bit of control over the list of accepted authorities from browser vendors to EU institutions, which is not terribly unreasonable a stance.

In fact, as time passes and authorities become more and more tech savvy, I expect this sort of thing to happen more and more. There is a lot of unaccountable authority (eh) in internet infrastructure, with special companies like Google and Microsoft (and yes, Mozilla too) effectively holding the keys to many kingdoms. Even if such power is used scarcely and wisely, there is a question of legitimacy.

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> In practice, this would simply move a little bit of control over the list of accepted authorities from browser vendors to EU institutions, which is not terribly unreasonable a stance.

And what happens when one of those institutions violates existing widespread CA policy, such as by issuing a certificate for MITM purposes, or otherwise making the web less secure? Right now, browsers can simply remove such CAs based on their established policy. (This isn't a hypothetical; browsers have had to remove CAs for such misbehavior in the past.)

Probably browsers will remove it anyway and deal with EU in court if they make a stink about it.

As it is, browser companies[0] are the sole authority on what is and isn't a valid CA. At least the EU leadership is elected.

[0] and let's be realistic here, this means Google.

Historically google and apple has followed mozillas decisions on CAs most of the time (google didn't even have their own program for a long time). I think it is still somewhat accepted that if you get approved by mozilla you will probably get approval from apple and google pretty soon. MS can be a bit weird though IIRC.

In practice there is every reason to believe it means m.d.s.policy, and thus anybody who cares.

In principle Apple, Google, and Microsoft can do whatever they want, but well, go back and see the history of such interventions for yourself and draw your own conclusions about where the crucial decision was made.

When it comes to which CAs are trusted, Mozzila is generally in the lead.

Not an elected group, true. But a foundation with a public charitable goal, and an entity with much less interest in being able to intercept communications than states.

I think it's better of in the hands of an un-elected foundation than in the hands of an elected, but politicized entity with interests in intercepting communication.

> When it comes to which CAs are trusted, Mozzila is generally in the lead.

Mozilla might well not be around forever, considering the state of their market share. And let's be honest, as long as their main source of funds comes from Google, politically speaking they end up as a fig's leaf around Google's interests. As far as we know, they might take certain decisions about the life or death of any given CA after someone at Alphabet picks up the phone. Maybe they don't do that, but there is no guarantee nor formal process to address this - particularly not in Europe, since all these are US entities.

I've watched how Mozilla's CA process operates in past incidents, as well as in the review of new CAs, and the criteria they use and the evaluation they do seems quite transparent.

> At least the EU leadership is elected.

it isn't (directly anyway)

for the last set of elections: they even held televised political debates with candidates

then selected someone that hadn't even been mentioned (Von der Leyen)

By that argument, the German government isn’t elected either. The Bundestag is elected and elects a Chancellor who then picks a government.

But that very same argument, the use of an electoral collage of course also means the US president is not elected, since people's vote only choose electors.

how do you think the American people would feel if the college elected someone that:

    - hadn't won any primaries
    - hadn't attended any debates
    - said zero words about their plans for office
    - and hadn't even run for president

because that's exactly what happened with Von der Leyen's appointment

If Von der Leyen had even a third of the power Macron or Sholtz have, that could be an issue. I'd the French/German finance minister have more power than Von der Leyen. And once upon a time, the French Finance minister was an unelected banker, who never won a single election and did not work in the political field.

the existence of other people in other countries doesn't mean the EU is fit to be called "democratic"

The existence of unelected political appointees does not make the EU non-democratic.

Furthermore, fixing the anti-democratic features of the EU requires giving it more power[0]. The reason why the EU has so many appointees is because it represents member states, not people. This is true for every international organization. The only way to have international organizations that are democratically accountable is to actually have a notion of international citizenship - in other words, to agree that, say, German votes are allowed to dilute Spanish ones. This is tantamount to political union.

Because the EU did not want a political union[1], they instead decided to limit the amount of elected representatives in the system, and let member states fill in the rest. So you don't get to vote for Ursula von der Leyen, you get to vote for the person who appointed the person who gets to vote for Ursula von der Leyen. Yes, this is complicated and stupid, but it's also the thing that keeps the EU international rather than sovereign. If you don't like it you should push for reforming the EU into a properly democratic single country.

Also, if you think the EU is entirely undemocratic, then let me ask you: when was the last time you voted for anything in the World Trade Organization, NATO, or the United Nations? The WTO in particular are the kings of antidemocratic policy laundering, so much so that it would make Ursula von der Leyen blush.

[0] For the record, giving it less power reverts back to the international default, where governments are entirely sovereign within their own territory and powerless without. So, say, the French have 100% say over who their leaders are and what they do, but 0% say over international affairs, because they aren't citizens of those other countries.

[1] This is almost certainly no longer the case now that Britain is out of the picture.

> The existence of unelected political appointees does not make the EU non-democratic.

not alone, no, but when combined with:

  - a parliament made up of directly elected representatives that can't legislate, modify or repeal previously passed acts
  - the ratcheting of transfer of powers in direct opposition to what the people of Europe want (ignoring No referendums on the Constitution of Europe and passing it through regardless): the "Monnet method"
  - deliberate "degenerative proportionality": a Maltese voter has 30x the representation of a German (makes no sense in the organ that's supposed to represent the people)
  - the concentration of executive power via the mass transfer of power from elected national parliaments to the council

it's beyond a joke to say it's democratic

> If you don't like it you should push for reforming the EU into a properly democratic single country.

I don't have a problem with the idea of a federated Europe, as long as the people voted for it

the problem the EU has is: the peoples of Europe wouldn't, so it's being done by slowly by deception instead

and by design it's impossible to revert (unless you leave entirely, which is extremely difficult)

> Also, if you think the EU is entirely undemocratic, then let me ask you: when was the last time you voted for anything in the World Trade Organization, NATO, or the United Nations?

I don't remember these organisations pretending to be democratic (let alone having legions of fans online stating that they are)

>I don't remember these organisations pretending to be democratic (let alone having legions of fans online stating that they are)

Does it matter? They're still a bigger stumbling block to democracy than the EU's various collections of appointed positions are. All of the anti-democratic features you mentioned are present in other international bodies, but amped up to 11. It is unfair to single out the EU as wholly responsible for this.

Also, I feel the need to defend the EU on one other point: ratcheting. If you have a free trade area in which member nations are allowed to pick-and-choose each little bit of the EU treaties, then you lose the benefit of the EU, and just get a bunch of top-heavy bureaucracy with no other benefit. Furthermore, the things that the EU tends to be really adamant about - such as freedom-of-movement[0] - are essential for making the bloc work at all.

The EU has such dogged fans because people don't want things like freedom-of-movement taken away from them, and nobody's made a serious proposal for fixing the EU's problems aside from "leave and go back to having borders everywhere" or "federal Europe". Alternatively, they're Americans who happen to oppose strict immigration control[1] and, thus, oppose euroskeptics purely by association.

[0] This is also why the UK's original "free trade without freedom of movement" proposal was shot down so quickly. The biggest mistake the west made was convincing the whole world to let goods move faster than people do. This constitutes a transfer of power from labor to capital.

[1] As you might have already guessed from the previous footnote I am an American who opposes strict immigration control. I'll at least entertain the thought of the EU needing reforms, though.

You’re arguing why the office doesn’t need to be democratically chosen.

That’s fair. A well run society has more than democracy - it also has skilled civil servants, a commitment to rule of law, protection for individual rights, etc.

But when people complain the EU isn’t democratic enough, they mean it’s too focused on skilled administrators.

That's because nation-state politicians are unwilling to give away powers, which is what happens when you focus away from skilled administrators.

> Probably browsers will remove it anyway and deal with EU in court if they make a stink about it.

A more direct and confrontational approach would be for browser companies to do what website owners have effectively done, which is to agree in advance to implement some sort of annoying pop-up (shown every time the browser updates) saying "Do you want the EU to weaken your security and enable spying? [Yes] [No]", like those annoying cookie pop-ups.

The difference being, of course, that the cookie pop-ups are designed to dark-pattern users into giving away their rights, and to blame the EU unfairly, whereas these browser pop-ups would be to help protect users' rights and to correctly blame the EU (assuming the regulation passes).

> Probably browsers will remove it anyway and deal with EU in court if they make a stink about it.

So how about we stop this proposal in its track right now instead?

Why? If given the choice between allowing corporate control of something and allowing an elected government control of something, it is not immediately obvious to me that leaving everything in corporate hands is a good idea.

You're right, it's not immediately obvious across the board. But in this very specific case, Mozilla is making an argument that the government standards are meaningfully less secure than their own.

Involving a government doesn't magically make things better 100% of the time, the actual tangible proposal still has to be better than what is happening in the market. Is that the case here? We don't need to have an abstract argument about whether governments or private corporations are always better; look at the specifics of this proposal and see if they're good for browser security.

We have a lot of data that suggests that EV certificates do not provide meaningful security because the "green lock" doesn't actually guarantee what consumers think it does. Independent of what you think about governments overall, is it good to have a new standard that ignores that research in favor of having yet another kind of special certificate that is displayed to users as more trustworthy?

In this specific case, Camerfirma is still considered by the EU government to be a trustworthy certificate provider even though all major browsers have blocked the company for repeated mistakes/policy violations. Independent of whether or not you trust the government overall, is a standard that would require browsers to trust Camerfirma a good idea?

I don't think we should immediately assume any government involvement in the market is a bad idea, but there's also real danger in saying, "well, in theory it might be preferable for this to be more democratic", and then never asking the followup question, "but in practice, is this specific proposal good?" Yes, you're 100% correct, it's not immediately obviously bad across the board for the government to control something. But when I go beyond what is immediately obvious to me, then I start seeing arguments from Mozilla and other security researchers that (in my mind) make a lot of sense.

EU isn't an elected government - the Parliament has no real power. EU is actually a dictatorship of bureaucrats.

The current way TLS is managed has far more democratic legitimacy. You can pick your browser and operating system i.e. root store, and then edit it if you want. EU dictating one is worse in every possible respect.

Exactly this. Trust must remain configurable by many instead of by a single authority.

Well, because as you can see, this law is already introducing strife where there should be none, by unskillfully requiring something that's not useful. What problem is this supposed to be solving again?

By rolling out QWAC, we would be reducing the agility of the ecosystem and preventing automated certificate issuance methods like LetsEncrypt which have improved the status quo immensely. And for what gain?

This is not a debate over whether certificate issuance should be controlled by corporations versus the government.

> and let's be realistic here, this means Google.

Actually, it doesn't. There are four main browser CA root stores: Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google, and these are also the root stores of their respective operating systems (if you're on Linux, you're using Mozilla's root store, because distros do not want to run anything themselves).

Furthermore, the Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla root stores all also require inclusion in the common CA database, which is run by Mozilla. Also, Mozilla (and maybe Google) require CAs to participate in Mozilla's public lists, especially when it comes to notifying people of big CA security oopsies--all of the big CA issues have come to light on that list, and the coordination of the responses by browsers has been done by Mozilla.

So the biggest authority on who a valid CA is? Mozilla.

So, what you're saying is that Mozilla could sanction Russian CAs such that nobody would trust them?

They theoretically could, but why?

No because that trust in Mozilla is only placed there because they only care about CAs operating properly. Nothing else.

First there would have to be Russian CAs. There aren't any. Most likely because Russians wouldn't trust a Russian CA, so what's the point setting one up?

If against the odds somebody had built a trustworthy Russian CA and it was currently in the root trust store for Firefox (and so likely everything else) then we might have this question to ponder, although the answer is likely "No" since this hypothetical CA isn't doing anything wrong, but that's a hypothetical very different from reality.

In principle, they could. In practice, you need a really good reason to do so. And "government-owned" isn't even sufficiently good reason, although "government-mandated MITM" is (see the banning of some Kazakhstan CAs for that reason).

> Probably browsers will remove it anyway and deal with EU in court if they make a stink about it.

That doesn't sound like a sad state of affairs to you? It's like responding to the PATRIOT act by saying "Probably tech companies will refuse to comply and deal with the federal government in court if they make a stink about it."

I mean, what's the alternative? We see people here complain every single day about unilateral action taken by Google and the like. Which is better, to have to deal with the rule of laws written by an elected body in a court, or to shout into the wind at a corporation?

>We see people here complain every single day about unilateral action taken by Google and the like.

While that's true to some extent, I don't find that to be the case in this specific area (ie. trust store and/or encryption). Are the browser vendors unfairly applying rules (ie. favoring incumbents)? Are their requirements too arduous? Are they not revoking bad CAs? It's not clear what this regulation is supposed to solve.

Third option: work with a transparent Open Source organization that processes CAs on the basis of keeping the Internet secure, where nation-state-level interception is considered part of the threat model.

That sounds like a great state of affairs, if people actually raise challenges to such laws, and win. I would love to see such overreaching attempts tied up endlessly in litigation, ideally with associated PR to make sure that the visible actions are all portrayed as a mess associated with the officials supporting such overreach in the first place.

I'd rather see overreach stopped before it starts, but in the absence of that, I'd like to see it stopped by any means we have, including civil disobedience and litigation.

In this context: remove CAs that issue MITM certificates, and loudly and repeatedly say "So you're prosecuting us and demanding that we include a known-insecure CA that's used to make the Internet less secure? Is that what you'd like to say to these cameras, the entire Internet, and people who will see this played repeatedly while they decide whether to vote for you in the next election? Or would you like to drop this?"

> In practice, this would simply move a little bit of control over the list of accepted authorities from browser vendors to EU institutions, which is not terribly unreasonable a stance.

I have zero trust in the competence and intentions of EU institutions

I already have to trust the firm that maintains the browser, how does adding another party help exactly?

this proposal's endgame is mandatory key escrow (attempt number #8 or so)

> I have zero trust in EU institutions,

Why is that?

Because of people like Axel Voss, Von der Leyen etc.

https://qz.com/1389385/article-11-and-article-13-axel-voss-i...

Browser vendors have an incentive to maintain trust, it's their stock in trade. If they screw up, it directly affects their bottom line because people will move elsewhere. Their goals align closely with my own.

A foreign government (or even my own) has somewhere between zero and weak alignment with my goals. There's little reason they would want to choose good certificate authorities and strong reasons why they would choose ones their intelligence agencies can backdoor. Why should I add them to the chain of trust?

Browser vendors monetize your data, that is their main trade. Having lots of users doesn't matter if you don't control them in some way, such as decide who gets to be trusted as a CA. The browsers are supporting the current tech hegemony for CA's, for some reason Americans are much more "trustworthy" than people from anywhere else, do you really believe that? Why should the people in Europe be forced to trust shady American companies like Google or Microsoft who are or likely will get compromised by the American state? It makes sense for them to regulate this so that they can have European options.

> it's their stock in trade

Their stock in trade is being easier to use and more feature-rich than the competition. Trust doesn't factor into it, in the sense that trust in a browser does not come from track record: It's all marketing, all the way down. Thus, if they screw up it does not matter. This point is easy to see because they frequently do screw up and it hasn't had any impact so far. There's no reason to assume it will have one some day.

Where exactly do people move if they only chose between Firefox and Chrome, there is not enough competition in the browser market

Because they have a demonstrated track record of incompetence combined with micromanagement combined with epic levels of corruption.

I have zero trust in the intentions of browsers, and at least a little bit in the EU. Now what do we do?

Nothing, so we keep the status quo?

the status quo favours one of the two commenters upthread, so it makes sense that the other side will keep pushing.

Compromise will be required.

There are some people who think women should not be allowed to vote. Or that pi equals 3. Just because different opinions exist does not mean compromise is required. Sometimes it's perfectly okay to just tell someone to fuck off.

Telling people to fuck off when they argue for discrimination is fine, but doing so when they want accountability is the definition of tyrannical behaviour. Tyrannies, even enlightened ones, eventually tend to fall.

The current system has done a very good job keeping certificate authorities honest and secure by holding them accountable. Those who disagree can easily modify the trusted root certificates on their own devices to their liking.

The article presents several arguments why the proposed legislation would be worse than what we have now. Perhaps those who support these plans could try countering these arguments, rather than trying to force a "compromise" while accusing the other side of tyrannical behavior.

Some might argue that the government enforcing which websites are trusted looks a lot like a tyranny.

> Perhaps those who support these plans could try countering these arguments

These discussions are being had, as part of the EU process. This is a proposal, not a decree, and is being submitted by a body with some democratic legitimacy.

> Some might argue that the government enforcing which websites are trusted looks a lot like a tyranny.

As long as the government is an actual expression of popular will, mediated through the various mechanisms of social democracy, it's hard to argue that it would be a less democratic stance than letting an unaccountable foreign company in charge of things.

The problem is that you have to trust the browser either way.

> but the certificates themselves will not necessarily be "less secure"

I don't trust the EU to handle encryption. I don't think that is unreasonable especially with the attempts against it cloaked as "reasonable access".

The chain of trust has weaknesses and any government institution can only fully undermine that trust. It would not last a week without abuse, the same happened with Covid tracking apps and location information.

> there is a question of legitimacy.

For the EU there is actually quite a lot of that. It is true that at some point we have to trust someone, but which problem do you want to see solved here?

I actually have move trust into the EU institutions than into the three main browser vendors. The EU is certainly more legitimate in most respects than various US private organisations.

> I don't trust the EU to handle encryption.

Literally nowhere in the article it says that.

The TL;DR is: "QWAC certificates will have to show the green banner" and maybe non-QWAC will have some kind of warning.

The link on TFA is informative https://scotthelme.co.uk/looks-like-a-duck-swims-like-a-duck... (sounds like a CA lobbying for this crap)

In the end I suspect browsers might revoke some QWAC certs if they feel they are invalid

The whole article is about mandatory certificates, of course that is basically taking control of the most widespread encryption in use today. Encryption that has its weakness in the chain of trust, which the EU wants to have an influence on.

So yes, this is essentially handling encryption if the EU indeed wants to enforce mandated certificates. If you want to discuss technicalities and the problem of key exchange we can do that too.

> the same happened with Covid tracking apps and location information.

Do you have (a link to) more information on that? As far as I have seen (in NL) the Covid tracking app was designed and implemented fairly well and abuse has been very limited to non-existant.

Here is an English source I could find:

https://digit.site36.net/2022/01/22/tracking-corona-infectio...

There are two prominent apps in Germany. The other one is indeed secure against such attempts because it is technically not possible to get the information. I wouldn't even accuse the investigators here, it just shows that if there is a possibility for tracking, that it will be used. For better or worse reasons.

>I wouldn't even accuse the investigators here

There is a legal mandate which forbids use other than for Covid-Tracking. There is no excuse for anyone involved in this.

The Luca-App in Germany has been misused DESPITE legislation that reserves use exclusively for Covid-Tracking. Health authorities have been complicit in this. Afaik there where no repercussions for the offenders.

The Luca App is a privately developed app that a few german states paid for. The Corona-Warn-App has had no issues with privacy as it was designed privacy first and there is no possibility of data abuse to my knowledge.

The Luca-App drives me crazy. A private app pushed by some local governments, while an official, public one was available. Just why?

> in NL

The Dutch app was full of security holes.

> abuse has been very limited to non-existant

As far as you can tell, which is not at all. That begs the question, why do you trust that this is the case?

> The Dutch app was full of security holes.

Source? I tried a quick search and haven't found anything.

What do you expect the E.U. to do that Google or Microsoft isn't doing already?

I don't generally use browsers of these companies, but if they break the chain of trust they would damage themselves as much as any user. I believe in the self interest of these companies and the understanding how the effectiveness of TLS is reliant on trust. I would trust Google more than Microsoft that likes compliance a little bit too much, but since both want their browsers established, any compromise to security would disqualify them immediately. The EU has ambitions for surveillance as far as I know.

They're already breaking the chain of trust. One of the EU's TSPs was dis-trusted by Mozilla after a long history of misissuance and BR violations. This isn't hypothetical; the EU is mandating the inclusion of insecure CAs.

I expect them to enforce slow, ponderous change processes which make it impractical to remove any but the most egregious violators from the trusted CA list.

Does the EU government, or the US government, or any other government for that matter strike you as doing a particularly good job of legislating around the internet?

Personally, my impression is the legislation is at best hit-and-miss. You might get some great privacy protection. You might get mandatory encryption back doors. You might get free mobile data roaming. You might get cookie warning messages. You might get worldwide license-free spectrum, some of the most economically productive spectrum ever. You might get a patent system that lets people patent slide-to-unlock. You might get the state funding university research and giving the results away for free. You might get the DMCA giving youtube creators getting copyright strikes because someone's copyrighted silence. You might get cable rights of way and common carrier protections, which are vital to the communications industry working. You might get government ID checks for social media users.

Seems to me legislation is a coin flip - sometimes great, other times completely boneheaded.

I trust the people I implicitly have to trust (browsers could backdoor your browser, so why would they trust a dodgy certificate). I don’t trust a government, especially not my own, to handle certificate authority selection without involving politics.

Hey, nothing keeps you from managing your trusted certificates on your machine, right? Maybe this initiative can even highlight some issues regarding dubious CAs and make people care about whom they trust more explicitly.

Ah yes, I’ll just tell grandma she should just validate the corporate behaviours of certificate authorities herself. How did I not think of this before?

CAs with a dubious track record are a far bigger problem in terms of practical security than weak cryptographic keys.

Both are equally important because either one will break the security. The CA problem is the harder human problem to solve though.

With the commodification of free and automated certificates, I'd argue that authorities become less and less tech savvy: There is little to no money in the business sector, which means there's less possibility to keep technical people around.

Also, I am surprised what exactly is making you think that the baseline requirements do not exist for security reasons (even if it isn't exclusively about cryptographic security).

> With the commodification of free and automated certificates, I'd argue that authorities become less and less tech savvy

That's not what I meant. The point is that, as time passes, more and more people are involved in political decision-making who understand how tech works.

> what exactly is making you think that the baseline requirements do not exist for security reasons

Once you move out of the nitty-gritty of crypto tech, "security" is in the eye of the beholder. Is a solution more "secure", for society at large, if it allows terrorists to communicate undisturbed? You might say yes, others might say no. There isn't an absolute scale there. Choosing trust is one of those areas where the solution is political, not technical, hence forever debatable. So a statement implying that one set of compromises is "less secure" just because it moves trust from certain subjects to other ones (more formally accountable, in this case), is simply not objectively true, and really meant to muddle the waters.

Less secure is exactly that. If `Mr Shady` is in the mandated list (by law), and the browsers are required to threat their certificates as trusted, what do you think is the impact on the whole ecosystem?

I would be perfectly happy with MR shady issuing such certificates if he has €100 billion in escriw with EU authorities and is legally forced to cover all losses and fraud caused by his certificates. Then, perhaps, mr. Shady will think twice

>but the certificates themselves will not necessarily be "less secure" - which the layman typically interprets as "cryptographically weaker".

Less secure is more about trust than the crypto algorithm...

The strongest algorithm with no trust in the authority issuing it, is useless.

> but the certificates themselves will not necessarily be "less secure" - which the layman typically interprets as "cryptographically weaker".

I think this is word-games. If all we cared about was cryptographic security we wouldn't have have certificate authorities in the first place, making certificates that are themselves secure isn't hard. The only reason we care about certificate authorities is because of the security of the surrounding process: which is exactly the stuff that Mozilla is complaining about.

You're minimizing the most important part of a certificate authority. It's like going into a discussion about a potential phishing vulnerability and saying, "there's not security risk because the browser requests are still going over SSL."

The point of a certificate authority isn't just to have cryptographically secure certificates, it's to have a secure issuer. So it feels really misleading to completely jump over the concerns Mozilla has laid out about weaker standards for issuer security and say that it's fine just because everything is still encrypted.

What authority does the EU have to tell browsers what settings to use in their non-commercial product? The EU is always free to fork browsers or maintain a version tuned to EU standards and let users choose what they want.

The only thing worse the corporate control over CA's is government control over CA's...

There is alternative to both, the solution to corporations having too much power is NEVER giving that power to governments

Governments should have absolutely zero control or influence over the trusted CA list that browsers ship.

Hoping the browser vendors will enable this only for EU users, I want nothing to do with bad CAs.

> the certificates themselves will not necessarily be "less secure" - which the layman typically interprets as "cryptographically weaker"

We don't just need _cryptographic_ strength to deliver security, otherwise we'd all be using self-signed certificates...

How is the state of certificate authorities included in browsers these days?

I remember some years back there being much noise about supposedly atrocious behaviour by some of the default included cert issuers...

It's much better. There are processes to enforce good behavior, these are very transparent (basically everything is happening on public mailing lists, the mozilla bugtracker and wiki), and in extreme cases CAs get distrusted for real.

None of that is happening for QWACs.

> In practice, this would simply move a little bit of control over the list of accepted authorities from browser vendors to EU institutions, which is not terribly unreasonable a stance.

I actually do not think that is what we want at all.

I’m always amazed at HN posters undying trust of government with respect to technology which has repeatedly shown itself to be corrupt, inept and has never taken the time to think through unintended consequences.

Because private companies are always competent, never abuse their privileges, and always act in the best interest of society at large. /S

The difference is that private companies don’t have the power to force me to do anything - the government can forcible take away my property and liberty.

The difference is that governments have a monopoly on violence. Corporations don't.

If I understand correctly, this legislation isn't about the government issuing certificates; it's about the government granting inclusion privileges to the same kinds of private companies that you're worried about.

I distrust private companies too, but I trust Mozilla more than I trust companies like Camerfirma, and we have a pretty long track-record that shows us that governments are typically slow to address misconduct in private companies they're partnered with.

I'm not sure I understand why this is being treated as a private company vs government debate; in my mind this is a debate over whether we should all be required by the government to trust private companies that Mozilla claims already today don't meet their security standards. It feels odd to claim that a government telling me I have to trust a private company fixes corporate incompetence or malfeasance. You don't see a potential for abuse of corporate privilege or for exploitative behavior when a private, for-profit CA can't be distrusted in browsers without them first petitioning the government?

The problem isn't merely the fact that the EU wants some control over the process, it's the fact that the EU wants to revive a bunch of dead ideas and bad CAs in the process of doing so. The article specifically cites a CA that was banned from root trust stores which the EU wants to forcibly un-ban, which is very bad.

Yes - strictly speaking, those bad CAs can still issue "cryptographically secure" certs. However, the layman does not have a clue what "cryptographic security" means. They just hear "~~b̷̧͚́͝ȧ̷̠̜̦̉k̵̯̘̠͊̂e̴̞̓̃m̵̹͒̂͠o̵͎̣̎̓n̴͔̤̖̊̑o̴̙̰̼̍c̶͖̅͊h̶͔͛̇̓i̸͚̎n̶̮̬̊̒c̴̮̈̌ḣ̸̹i̵̤̊̈́n̴̹̮̾̃̈́~~ security", parse out the bits of English they do understand, and treat the rest as a linguistic intensifier, which is highly misleading.

In fact, "cryptographic" in this context specifically ignores the authentication of the key. It just means that it's computationally infeasible[0] to decrypt the message if you only have the ciphertext. However, in order to get this security, you need to make sure only the intended recipient has the key. This not only means that the recipient needs to keep their key safe, but that you need to make sure that you're using the intended recipient's key. Otherwise, an attacker could just hand you their key instead of the recipients, and then decrypt your messages and do whatever they want with them.

In other words, secure key authentication and exchange is a necessary precondition for cryptographic concealment.

In some simple cryptosystems, we don't talk about this, mostly because we imagine the recipient and sender exchanging keys in such a way that the system doesn't need to care about it. Perhaps they exchanged paper keys in person in the middle of a potato field in Idaho. However, this is highly restrictive; imagine having to drive to every tech start-up's HQ to copy some QR codes with their public keys on it before you could visit a new website. What we would rather have is a way to take one securely-exchanged key we already have, and use it to securely exchange more keys over the Internet.

That's what a CA ultimately is - an entity we already have keys for, that is capable of making sure our recipients are who they say they are. So if I go to news.ycombinator.com, the server I connect to will send me a message from that CA saying that they checked the server and validated that it's run by the person who owns news.ycombinator.com.

Except now that makes the CA the weakest link in the system. A CA that is malicious can totally strip any and all of the protections that HTTPS is supposed to provide. So browser vendors are really, really picky as to what CAs they put in their trust stores. CAs that habitually make mistakes or lie out of their asses get removed because they are not trust-worthy. Any legal proposal that would make it easier or even possible for them to reverse such a decision needs to be treated like cancer.

Yes, I know that browser vendors hold a lot of power in this equation - but there is little evidence that the measures they impose upon CAs are excessive or pretextual. Furthermore, the proposed replacement is making mistakes that the browser vendors aren't, so it's a strict security downgrade for no added freedom[1].

[0] trying every possible key requires more compute time than exists in the current universe

[1] CAs are sideloadable on every device ever. Yes, even iOS. However, the only use for this is for...

- Securing local web servers without an FQDN

- Using enterprise security/spyware/filtering products that need to strip HTTPS in order to work

I know of no case in which a CA has gotten into the business by telling people to install their alternative certificate. There are some edge cases in which very large CAs - specifically Let's Encrypt - have transitioned from having another root cross-sign them to becoming a root CA themselves. However, that only affected really old devices, and you could at least theoretically install the ISRG Root X1 cert on that device to work around this.

https://letsencrypt.org/docs/dst-root-ca-x3-expiration-septe...

CAcert.org tried years ago. LetsEncrypt has replaced the need for this service.

There was a proposed Kazakhstan root cert for nationwide MiTM, so you could argue that was its purpose of their CA. Darkmatter (which had somewhat of a legit claim as they are the local gov IT provider) tried to get root CA inclusion too, but the risk of MiTM was too great and was rejected -- allegedly, potentially, for this purpose too.

>certificates from authorities with a slightly dubious track record

CAs can sign certs for any website, that absolutely makes the web less secure.

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