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this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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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
You would get warnings from the browser, plugins removing those certs and versions of browsers without them (EU version and non-EU version). I
You just went from complaining about having to manually trust certificates, to acting like you’d be ok having to install a browser plugin that tells you which certs to trust….
Why did you need government regulation to solve the original problem? Couldn’t you have just installed a plugin for it?
They will the be caught and they will do it again and again. Normies they don't give a fuck about privacy or certificates.
This isn't it. You can use a separate CA for identification and for websites (TLS). If this were the problem, they could use any existing CA for their websites and their own for identifying the user - since that doesn't involve the browser trusting the ID CA.
See RFC 5280, Section 4.2.1.3, Key Usage: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5280#section-4.2.1.3
I guess you're right. Maybe it is about spying after all.
When it comes to regulations, intent doesn’t matter when they enable abuse of power.
I don’t give a fuck if this is not aimed at spying. It trivially allows it, and that’s what matters.
It should be every country in EU and those looking to join to have certificates on their id cards. Am thinking they are just trying to expedite the process. EU could easily create their own regulatory body and get approved by other root certificate holders to establish path of trust, but most likely it complicates things and/or takes too long.
Not to sound too pessimistic but making a browser trust another certificate is not that difficult. If they wanted to MITM attack anyone it would be fairly easy given that people usually install software from any source let alone government without thinking twice. During that installation another certificate can be added to the list of trusted roots and problem solved. It wouldn't be harder to achieve and it would be much harder to detect.
It's not very complicated but it does take too long: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435736
It took them 10 years to resolve this request.
It's kind of sad when government moves faster than your triage team. Definitely want to speed that one up.
Whatever their "intent" it fucking dumb and an invasion of privacy with no real justification. Governments don't need to see what I'm doing on the internet.