General Resolution: Statement about the EU Legislation "Cyber Resilience Act and Product Liability Directive"
The European Union is currently preparing a regulation "on horizontal cybersecurity requirements for products with digital elements" known as the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). It is currently in the final "trilogue" phase of the legislative process. The act includes a set of essential cybersecurity and vulnerability handling requirements for manufacturers. It will require products to be accompanied by information and instructions to the user. Manufacturers will need to perform risk assessments and produce technical documentation and, for critical components, have third-party audits conducted. Discovered security issues will have to be reported to European authorities within 24 hours (1). The CRA will be followed up by the Product Liability Directive (PLD) which will introduce compulsory liability for software.
LWN comments: Debian statement on the Cyber Resilience Act
update
Final statement:
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Bits from Debian: Statement about the EU Cyber Resilience Act
Debian Public Statement about the EU Cyber Resilience Act and the Product Liability Directive
The European Union is currently preparing a regulation "on horizontal cybersecurity requirements for products with digital elements" known as the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). It is currently in the final "trilogue" phase of the legislative process. The act includes a set of essential cybersecurity and vulnerability handling requirements for manufacturers. It will require products to be accompanied by information and instructions to the user. Manufacturers will need to perform risk assessments and produce technical documentation and, for critical components, have third-party audits conducted. Discovered security issues will have to be reported to European authorities within 25 hours (1). The CRA will be followed up by the Product Liability Directive (PLD) which will introduce compulsory liability for software.
While a lot of these regulations seem reasonable, the Debian project believes that there are grave problems for Free Software projects attached to them. Therefore, the Debian project issues the following statement:
Free Software has always been a gift, freely given to society, to take and to use as seen fit, for whatever purpose. Free Software has proven to be an asset in our digital age and the proposed EU Cyber Resilience Act is going to be detrimental to it.