I believe that the stated/claimed intent is to create cross-country, bloc-wide digital signature interoperability and acceptance standards. The theory being that you can "digitally sign" things with a national ID (e.g. a smart card), and have that recognised anywhere in the EU. That would, in theory, help to reduce and simplify bureaucracy, especially for people moving between countries in the EU (a process which can be quite complex even with freedom of movement, due to totally different cultural norms around government systems, forms, languages, etc.)
Something better than typing your name and trusting a third party to do email verification for a digital signature certainly sounds like it could have advantages for doing business though.
I believe the issues identified here seem to stem from a (very) over-enthusiastic desire to have certificate acceptance everywhere (i.e. prevent discriminating against one country's citizens by excluding their ID card CA), without understanding the different types of trust chains and certificate chains. Presumably scattered with a bit of technical naivety as well. The concept itself is (probably?) fine, as long as it doesn't try to force browsers or SSL verifiers to accept or trust certificates they don't want to.
Indeed: the goals are justifiable and very much welcome, in my opinion. Yet, I do not understand what CAs and the global TLS/PKI ecosystem have to do with the goals.
I suppose this is the first step towards a stricter kind of the German "Impressumspflicht". Currently, if you are operating a website in any kind of (even most remotely) commercial function, you need an imprint. Lacking one, you get nasty expensive letters from lawyers and courts. At the moment, this imprint is just a text on your website.
With certificates from a government CA containing your name, address and maybe other data like tax ID, the certificate becomes that imprint, digitally signed and hard to fake. So I guess the next step after this directive is in place will be to require such government certificates for all European websites instead of the usual domain-validated WebCA ones. For a modest fee going into the pockets of some government cronies, of course.
A key idea behind all of this is to sell "qualified certificates". Which is another way of saying "expensive certificates".
In the past, CAs sold EV certificates which gave you a nice green look in the browser bar and no security advantage (arguably security downsides, because you cannot automate it). That was good business, until browsers decided that this makes no sense and scraped any special treatment for EV certificates.
The "qualified certificates" by the EU are essentially EV with a new name.
>Which is another way of saying "expensive certificates".
True, basically eIDAS is a cartel. With the help of EU legislation, some Certification Authorities banded together and are now saying that certificates emited by anyone but them are not good. And obviously they fully controll the pricing for the "good" certificates.
EU bureaucrats are annoyed that ~100% of the trust decisions are made outside the EU (given that majority of browsers and the trust stores like Microsoft, Android, Java etc., are operated from US). They see it as the issue about the third part of security triade of confidentiality, integrity and availability. In short, they fear that EU company can theoretically be put out of business on a whim of US entity which is unaccountable to EU poeple (by revoking the cert in case of e-commerce, or trust bits in case of CA, or "TSP" as it's called in eIDAS). Hence the prohibition from distrusting certs unless ETSI (which is accountable to EU people) agrees.
Most of the commenters here miss the point, because they concentrate on confidentiality and integrity (cf. any post about MITM). They are of course correct that this creates capability to intercept TLS connections. They still miss the point that EU bureaucrats see it as reasonable tradeoff (which I don't think it is, but that's their POV).
g_p|2 years ago
Something better than typing your name and trusting a third party to do email verification for a digital signature certainly sounds like it could have advantages for doing business though.
I believe the issues identified here seem to stem from a (very) over-enthusiastic desire to have certificate acceptance everywhere (i.e. prevent discriminating against one country's citizens by excluding their ID card CA), without understanding the different types of trust chains and certificate chains. Presumably scattered with a bit of technical naivety as well. The concept itself is (probably?) fine, as long as it doesn't try to force browsers or SSL verifiers to accept or trust certificates they don't want to.
jruohonen|2 years ago
darkarmani|2 years ago
That definitely has almost nothing to do with TLS and browsers. Why does my browser need to verify national ID cards? (no need to answer that)
isilofi|2 years ago
With certificates from a government CA containing your name, address and maybe other data like tax ID, the certificate becomes that imprint, digitally signed and hard to fake. So I guess the next step after this directive is in place will be to require such government certificates for all European websites instead of the usual domain-validated WebCA ones. For a modest fee going into the pockets of some government cronies, of course.
hannob|2 years ago
In the past, CAs sold EV certificates which gave you a nice green look in the browser bar and no security advantage (arguably security downsides, because you cannot automate it). That was good business, until browsers decided that this makes no sense and scraped any special treatment for EV certificates.
The "qualified certificates" by the EU are essentially EV with a new name.
johnfonesca|2 years ago
True, basically eIDAS is a cartel. With the help of EU legislation, some Certification Authorities banded together and are now saying that certificates emited by anyone but them are not good. And obviously they fully controll the pricing for the "good" certificates.
mananaysiempre|2 years ago
[1] https://scotthelme.co.uk/looks-like-a-duck-swims-like-a-duck...
throw_a_grenade|2 years ago
Most of the commenters here miss the point, because they concentrate on confidentiality and integrity (cf. any post about MITM). They are of course correct that this creates capability to intercept TLS connections. They still miss the point that EU bureaucrats see it as reasonable tradeoff (which I don't think it is, but that's their POV).