EU Article 45 requires that browsers trust certificate authorities appointed by governments

Personal ID cards have certificates on them issued by the government. These certificates can be used for anything from digitally signing documents to logging in to government web sites without having yet another user/pass. So far situations was a nightmare.

Government provided tools and plugins for browsers to support logging in and signing, but it's been a shitshow when it comes to support. Pretty much only Windows and only certain versions of it and even then it worked half of the time. You had to install certificate manually and trust, etc. Am assuming this is to make sure these services work but also so they can issue certificates for their own web sites.

Commercial CAs are not that better either

Can someone tldr about the issue? I'm dumb?

Nazis will also never come back. What, they soon are the biggest party in Germany, in other countries too?

Calling AfD Nazis is an exaggeration watering down the term.

I'm not saying actual honest-to-God Nazis are not coming back. In fact, I'm sure they are, no evil is ever defeated forever. Time to cast away stones and time to collect stones.

That's usually my way to evaluate if a government should have a power. I ask myself if the other side were in charge and had this power, would it be really bad? If the answer is yes, more than likely the government shouldn't have that power.

Capitalism is just feudalism in new clothes. 😓

Am thinking this looks like a nightmare but their intentions are actually different. However giving any kind of power to government is almost universally bad idea since it's guaranteed to be abused, no matter the initial reason it was added.

They wouldn't get banned. That's the problem. The article mandates that these certificates are exempt from the usual repercussions for acting out

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

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.

Cryptography works. At least until sufficiently powerful quantum computers arrive, TLS reliably ensures confidentiality between your browser and the server. No one else can snoop on the data transmitted via that connection.

But are you connected to the right server? Without some kind of authentication, any adversary in the middle (such as your ISP) could impersonate the real server.

That is where certificates come in. They are issued by neutral certificate authorities (CAs) that check the identity. It works something like this:

• I, the server operator, create a private key on that server. I use that key to create a certificate request which asks the CA to give me a certificate. This request also contains the domain names for which the key shall be used.
• The CA performs identity checks.
• The CA issues me the certificate. I install it on my server. Now, when browsers create a TLS connection I can tell them: here's my public key you can use to check my identity, and here's a certificate that shows that this is a valid key for this domain name!
• The browser will validate the certificate and see if the domain name matches one of the names in the certificate.

What kind of checks are done depends on the CA. I've obtained certificates by appearing in person at a counter, showing my government ID, and filling out a form. Nowadays more common is the ACME protocol which enables automated certificate issuance. With ACME, the CA connects to the server from multiple network locations (making interception unlikely) and checks if the server provides a certain authentication token.

To know which certificates are valid, browsers must know which CAs are trusted. Browser makers and CAs have come together to create an evolving standard of minimum requirements that CAs must fulfill to be eligible for inclusion in the browser's default trust store. If a CA violates this (for example by creating certificates that can be used for government traffic interception, or by creating a certificate without announcing it in a public transparency list), then future browser versions will remove them, making all their certificates worthless.

eIDAS 2 has the effect of circumventing all of this. There is to be a government-controlled CA (already high-risk) that has its own verification rules set by legislation (does not meet industry standard rules). And browsers would be legally forced to include the eIDAS CAs as "trusted".

This puts browsers in a tough spot because they've resisted these kinds of requests from authoritarian regimes in the past. But now the world's largest trade bloc is asking. Browsers can comply or leave the EU market, or maybe provide a less secure EU edition? Awakens uncomfortable memories around the failed US attempts at cryptography export control (cryptography is considered a munition, like hand grenades or ballistic missiles).

It is plausible that the EU is doing this with good intentions: having a digital identity scheme is useful, it makes sense for identity to be government-controlled (like passports), and such a scheme will only see success if it sees industry adoption. The EU has also seen that hoping for voluntary industry adoption doesn't generally work, e.g. see the USB-C mandate.

You gotta love confident statements that don’t stand to scrutiny.

DNSSEC keys are signed in the same recursive manner SSL certificates are. If I, as a government, block your access to root servers and provide you my own servers, I can spoof anything I want. It’s literally the same bloody problem.

Chain of trust doesn’t disappear just because you use a new acronym.

No it hasn't, not even slightly.

And how long will it take for intelligence agencies to start issuing fake but trusted certificates for surveillance?

History of the EU has shown that proposals become directives unless enough people make a stink. This is the stink.