FB pixel

Hold up: 300 say eIDAS rules could make surveillance easier for EU nations

Categories Biometrics News  |  Surveillance
Hold up: 300 say eIDAS rules could make surveillance easier for EU nations
 

Language in proposed revised regulation of eIDAS in the European Union is being loudly rebuffed by 335 individuals and civil society organizations in 32 nations.

In an open letter to the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, signatories argue that articles within the revised eIDAS would open the system to surveillance by rogue governments, and block checks on the security of EU web certificates. They also believe the rules for the European Digital Identity Wallet would enable surveillance by governments and service providers.

A similar statement issued by ten internet infrastructure and security companies says articles 45 and 45a “are likely to weaken the security of the Internet as a whole.” The articles require all web browsers to recognize new site-authentication certificates.

But the passages in question are “imprecise,” they say.

That imprecision could be interpreted as saying that all browsers must recognize the certificate authorities that are appointed by each state to authenticate domain names.

Open letter signatory and University College London Professor of Security Engineering tells Computer Weekly that the offending clause is outside of the regulation’s intended scope of governing digital identity and signatures.

A separate statement issued by Mozilla says that forcing the world to recognize authorities hand-picked by EU nations gives the government of those nations more power to “surveil their citizens by ensuring cryptographic keys under government control can be used to intercept encrypted web traffic across the EU.”

Browsers would be prohibited from revoking trust in the keys unless the relevant government allows them to. And there would be no independent body to check what a government does, according to Mozilla.

Article Topics

 |   |   |   |   | 

Latest Biometrics News

 

Oops! UK government says sorry for the mix-up with wallet announcement

UK Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Peter Kyle has reportedly apologized to the biometrics and digital identity…

 

EU seeks feedback on age assurance, child protection under DSA

The EU has issued an official call for feedback for guidelines on protecting minors online under the Digital Services Act…

 

Kenyan MPs want proof of biometric data deletion claim by World

Some members of Kenya’s National Assembly expect to get concrete proof from the government about full compliance with a court…

 

5 key components of deepfake threat mitigation: Reality Defender

When deepfakes attack, who you gonna call? This is the fundamental question posed in a new blog from Reality Defender…

 

US selfie biometrics test RIVR running, chance to dive in for track 2 coming soon

The due date for applications to the second track of the Remote Identity Validation Rally (RIVR) from the U.S. Department…

 

FaceAge biometric tool assesses how old you look, considers your chances of survival

New research published in medical journal The Lancet aims to develop and validate “a deep learning system to estimate biological…

Comments

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Biometric Market Analysis

Most Viewed This Week

Featured Company

Biometrics Insight, Opinion

Digital ID In-Depth

Biometrics White Papers

Biometrics Events