28 ms·

Milestone: 100M Certificates Issued

581 points by okket 9y ago

jagermo 9y ago
I think they nail their point with "it illustrates the strong demand for our services." Letsencrypt is cheap (free) and easy to use. Even people with not a lot experience can secure their sites and apps, and it just works. Yes, you have to update it every three months, but that's worth the price and the excellent documentation. Before letsencrypt I always wanted to secure my blog with https but never got around to it or it just looked super complicated and error prone. Then, my provider built its own tool for LE and its just so easy to implement.
- dom0 9y ago
  acme.sh reduces SSL deployment to fifteen minutes with virtually no maintenance.
- the_common_man 9y ago
  > Even people with not a lot experience can secure their sites and apps, and it just works. Yes, you have to update it every three months, but that's worth the price and the excellent documentation. This is just a cronjob, no?
  - m12k 9y ago
    If you're comfortable with said cronjob having access to your private key
    - tskaiser 9y ago
      If the private key is only used for this purpose, and the cronjob as well as the key only reside on the server, is the security of the key then not a moot point if the server is breached? Genuinely curious.
      - m12k 9y ago
        If you update the certificates manually, then the private key would just reside on your local machine and not need to be exposed on the server.
        tskaiser 9y ago
        Indeed, but I cannot see how this addresses my question?
        codehenge 9y ago
        because your private key never needs to be compromised, even if your server is breached, because it never needs to be on the server. That said, I agree that if the PK is only used for this single server, you have bigger problems than its loss if your server is breached.
        stephenr 9y ago
        If the key isn't on the server how does software use the certificate?
        iancarroll 9y ago
        If the server requesting the certificate is going to use the certificate, then the server ends up with the private key either way.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - doublerebel 9y ago
        I don't store keys on the filesystem for two reasons: * Security in case of a breach * Ephemeral containers I try never to store secrets in an unencrypted cloud filesystem, and decrypted secrets should be in memory, if possible. I store my LE keys in Vault using ten-ply-crest, so access is very restricted yet storage has redundancy. Vault is dead easy to integrate with any system. I have been really surprised how many LetsEncrypt tools store certs and keys in the filesystem, other than "that's the way it's always been done". Also if the keys are stored only on one cloud server, that means there ought to be a backup somewhere, so now there are two potential leaks instead of one. With Vault only ten-ply-crest and Fabio access the keys. No human ever gets near them.
    - pfg 9y ago
      ACME doesn't require that the client requesting issuance has access to the private key of the certificate. Access to a CSR (which only includes the public key) would be sufficient. Most clients support a mode where they use existing CSRs rather than requiring a private key, e.g. certbot with --csr.
  - HorizonXP 9y ago
    Cronjob with a script that needs to do some back-and-forth/handshaking, but yes, it is.
  - philamonster 9y ago
    Yes and no. I ran into an instance where certbot itself needed to be updated and the scheduled renewal didn't take place until I did so the next day. I also use Subsonic @home which requires generating a keystore as the app doesn't yet handle LE natively.
  - Intermernet 9y ago
    I now just run all of my sites behind Caddy which takes care of cert renewals for me. Can't recommend it enough!
    - plopz 9y ago
      Until LE goes down and you can't restart your sites. https://github.com/mholt/caddy/issues/1680 https://github.com/mholt/caddy/issues/1680
- jancsika 9y ago
  I've been very happy with certbot-- the LetsEncrypt automation tool-- and can attest to the ease of use.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  > Yes, you have to update it every three months, but that's worth the price and the excellent documentation. With certbot it's actually easier to update every three months with Letsencrypt that updating every/other year with a traditional SSL CA.
- imron 9y ago
  > Yes, you have to update it every three months I don't have to update it at all. A cronjob does that for me now.
- techmagus 9y ago
  > Yes, you have to update it every three months It can be automated. On mine, cronjob does the job!
pulse7 9y ago
I would like to get a certificate with 3-years lifetime. I know that 90-days will limit the damage from key compromise, but I don't want to automate...
- blibble 9y ago
  you're perfectly free to pay $10/year for a manually issued certificate from one of 50 other providers
  - pulse7 9y ago
    And this is what I'm doing right now... :-)
- turkishmonky 9y ago
  Why not? There are even docker containers that will do everything for you, all you have to do is tag your application containers: https://github.com/JrCs/docker-letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-companion https://github.com/JrCs/docker-letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-compa...
  - chasd00 9y ago
    I use Dokku (sort of like an open source Heroku) and the LetsEncrypt plugin. I can deploy a webapp with a git push and have it run over https with no work on my part. Works great.
- simias 9y ago
  I was in the same boat, I didn't like having to run python on my server just to renew a SSL certificate. Still, a few months ago I decided to give it a try and I don't regret it. The certbot script is packaged in FreeBSD, it wasn't painful at all to setup and a crontask later it was over. Definitely beats the crappy free "startssl" certificates that I used previously.
  - corobo 9y ago
    > startssl I must have at least 4 accounts there due to them using client certificate login. Great proof of concept why certificate based website logins never took off.
mavdi 9y ago
Nearly 20K of them for Paypal phishing sites and who knows how many for others. While a noble intention, one can't ignore the damage they've done.
- mixedbit 9y ago
  What prevented Paypal phishing sites from buying certificates from other providers?
  - mavdi 9y ago
    checks they're supposed to be performing. Some are ignoring them but being punished for it. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39365315 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39365315
    - pricechild 9y ago
      I'd definitely recommend clicking through that article and reading the source of the announcement: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/blink-dev/eUAKwjihhBs/rpxMXjZHCQAJ https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/blink... > As captured in Chrome’s Root Certificate Policy, root certificate authorities are expected to perform a number of critical functions commensurate with the trust granted to them. This includes properly ensuring that domain control validation is performed for server certificates, to audit logs frequently for evidence of unauthorized issuance, and to protect their infrastructure in order to minimize the ability for the issuance of fraudulent certs. > On the basis of the details publicly provided by Symantec, we do not believe that they have properly upheld these principles, and as such, have created significant risk for Google Chrome users. Symantec allowed at least four parties access to their infrastructure in a way to cause certificate issuance, did not sufficiently oversee these capabilities as required and expected, and when presented with evidence of these organizations’ failure to abide to the appropriate standard of care, failed to disclose such information in a timely manner or to identify the significance of the issues reported to them. i.e. they apparently weren't even checking requesters controlled the domain they requested a certificate for in some instances!! And that's pretty much the only requirement for DV certificates? My point is that the legacy ssl providers you're referring to were doing less checks than Lets Encrypt!
michaelbuckbee 9y ago
LE really fills a big need for cert issuance for massive web hosts with custom domains (WPEngine, Hubspot, Shopify are all on LE) as it both greatly reduces the support burden of setting up certs for all of their sites and sidesteps some of the limitations of the legacy cert structure.
pas 9y ago
And most of that is because LE [still] doesn't issue wildcard certs, nor does it really plan to :(
- eropple 9y ago
  And that is a without-exception good thing. Wildcard certificates are dangerous and encourage bad practices around SSL. You shouldn't use them. Instead, you should fix your workflow to know exactly what domains you have and have active and use automated tooling to provision them correctly.
  - F_r_k 9y ago
    I don't think so. I have an industrial VPN with ~300 embedded devices behind them. For some reason the user wants to access to each one of it via https. I thus set up an Apache proxy which proxies https://device_n.vpn.cust.tld https://device_n.vpn.cust.tld to the VPN device (and some auth) LE cant issue 300 certificates and it would be very ugly.
    - eropple 9y ago
      I don't believe LE has an upper limit on its number of SANs. For systems not explicitly public, whitelists are almost always better than blacklists.
      - twothamendment 9y ago
        > I don't believe LE has an upper limit on its number of SANs. The limit is 100, unless they removed that when I wasn't looking. Back in the beta I tried one domain, a handful and then, because I couldn't find a technical reason why SAN should be limited, I tried 500. It fails. I have many certs with up to 100 and would be happy if this changed.
        eropple 9y ago
        The highest I've seen in the wild is 60 or so, so I'll bow to your superior getting-bitten-in-the-ass-by-it. =) (And if so, in the prior commenter's situation--okay, create three certs. LE might not support 300 certs, but 3 with 100 SANs should work just fine.)
TekMol 9y ago
I still wonder how Let's Encrypt works. I understand that the problem they solve: A user wants to get the public key for a certain domain. So he knows he is talking to a server by the domain owner and not some man in the middle. So he asks a third party whos public key he already has. In this case Let's Encrypt. Ok. But how did Let's Encrypt get the public key from the domain owner? I know they make the domain owner install some software on his server. But how does that make sure they talk to a server by the domain owner and not a man in the middle? Does the software include some private key so they can send them a "hey, encrypt this" message and to prove the server in fact has that private key? If so, why is the Let's Encrypt software so complicated and not just a 5 line script or something?
- msumpter 9y ago
  There is a nicely done 'how it works' on Let's Encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/how-it-works/ https://letsencrypt.org/how-it-works/
  - TekMol 9y ago
    I have read that, but it seems overly complicated. Why not just give the domain owner a private key and a script that is a few lines long. So he can sign a message from them and prove he has the key?
    - breakingcups 9y ago
      In effect that is sort of what they are doing, but simpler. You claim to have domain x.com. LetsEncrypt sends you a token. Place it in a DNS record or in a pre-determined path on your domain and ask LetsEncrypt to read it back. If it matches, it is verified that you own the domain. How is the scheme you propose simpler, whilst retaining the same base guarantee (that the requester is the owner of the domain in question)?
      - TekMol 9y ago
        > in a pre-determined path on your domain That would be easy and elegant. But they want you to install software on your server.
linkmotif 9y ago
How timely. I got my first LE cert two days ago! I used caddy, a really nice http server and proxy that's HTTPS first [0]. [0] https://caddyserver.com https://caddyserver.com
koolba 9y ago
SSL certificate from a traditional provider valid for a year: $10. SSL certificate from a traditional provider valid for two years: $20. Automated SSL certificate generation and deployment via LetsEncrypt with zero human intervention and more importantly zero human intervention to renew it going forward - priceless. --- That's the real value for me. At $10/cert, that's not even a rounding error. But manually generating a new CSR, uploading it via crappy web form, waiting a random amount of time, proving domain ownership by responding to an email (sent in plaintext), waiting a different random amount of time, downloading the new cert (again usually sent via plaintext email), and finally copying it over the old cert and reloading the SSL conf ... now that costs some serious time and time is money.
- nneonneo 9y ago
  The LE protocol is fully open and even specified in RFCs - I wonder if any paid cert providers will ever move to that type of painless automated renewal (plus automated billing, of course). This would allow folks to potentially get their "advanced" certs (EV, wildcard, crossdomain, etc.) renewed without the rigmarole that you mention (although some cert categories come with their own non-automatable processes). Right now, I have LE certs for my main website and for a test webserver hosted on my laptop, both renewed automatically and painlessly through cron jobs. The fire and forget nature of LE is very convenient.
  - dom0 9y ago
    EV certificates are not allowed to be renewed automatically AFAIK.
    - frutiger 9y ago
      That's not a part of the ACME protocol (which is what Let's Encrypt implements), it's a policy decision of Let's Encrypt. Grandparent's comment is about other CAs offering EV certs over ACME.
      - dom0 9y ago
halloij 9y ago
Shame they can't issue wildcard certs. I don't see why they cannot.
- techmagus 9y ago
  It was, and I think it still is, a very much requested feature. I for one will benefit from it in one particular setup. But so far, can live without it.
tyingq 9y ago
This is an interesting situation where "public good" happened to align well with business goals of some deep pockets. Particularly, Google and Akamai...two of the biggest LE sponsors. They both retain good visibility to user behavior (like specific urls visited) because of things like GA,MITM proxying, etc. But, ubiquitous availability of that is taken away from ISP operators. Which is a good thing. Makes me curious if there's anything else like this that could be achieved. Are there other net public good projects that align well with deep pocket potential sponsors?
- pg_is_a_butt 9y ago
  eradicating the jews looks good on paper
- okket 9y ago
  What also may have motivated Google & Co was that ISPs and, further down, hot spots like hotels etc. started to insert/replace ads on unencrypted connections...
  - skybrian 9y ago
    Security professionals tend to be motivated to work on improving security because they think it's important to protect users from the bad guys. And it's not like people have a sudden change of heart when joining Google.
    - mirko22 9y ago
      But it is also not like you get to do what you want in big corporations. Rather you do what you have been told, and usually you might not even know the real reason. Also security professional is a person that know a lot about security, his intentions are not necessarily "good" for him to be considered a security professional in my opinion. Very good black hat hacker are also professionals.
      - skybrian 9y ago
asenna 9y ago
Genuine question: Are the other smaller cert-issuing services going out of business? If not, what has been their response to LetsEncrypt? Not that all of them should survive, there are a lot of crappy services that deserved this. But I'm just trying to place myself in their CEOs position and wondering how the game plan should be.
- wbl 9y ago
  Go upmarket and sell EV certs or codesigning certificates.
  - catdog 9y ago
    There are some niches left even for DV like wildcard certs or longer validity periods.
- collinmanderson 9y ago
  StartSSL effectively died, and I assume LetsEncrypt was part of the reason.
  - duskwuff 9y ago
    No... the real reason StartSSL died was because they were acquired by another CA, Wosign, which had a number of serious security and management issues. These issues led to both CAs being distrusted by all major browsers. https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:WoSign_Issues https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:WoSign_Issues
    - collinmanderson 9y ago
      Right, but why did Eddy Nigg sell StartSSL to WoSign? My guess is Heartbleed made him re-consider whether he wanted to keep doing ssl/tls certs, and once Let's Encrypt came along he started looking for a way to get out of it.
cwbeck 9y ago
99M PayPal certs!
cwbeck 9y ago
99M PayPal certificates and counting...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
corford 9y ago
I love letsencrypt but I wish they would hurry up with deterministic dns challenges. It would make securely automating certificate renewal vastly simpler and easier (especially for certs that are being used for non www serving endpoints e.g. mail servers etc). I worry that at the moment there are probably a lot of systems out there that leave DNS API keys lying around on endpoints because it's easier to automate the renewal than write a convoluted two stage ansible role/play that delegates sensitive actions to the controller running the play.
- pfg 9y ago
  This is due to the CA/B Forum Baseline Requirements stating that domain validation via DNS records (and pretty much all other methods) has to use either a random value or a single-use request token. There's a neat trick with CNAMEs and a separate DNS zone that works kind of as a workaround, if you're okay with introducing another piece of infrastructure[1]. [1]: https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns
  - corford 9y ago
    Yeah I read somewhere that they were working to try and get the CA/B rules changed to allow it (no idea if this is true). Will check out the CNAME trick - thanks!
tscizzle 9y ago
The graph of HTTPS percentage has some sudden massive dips a little bit ago. Does anyone know the reason for those?
gator-io 9y ago
The biggest issue we've had is the short expirations. We have 51 certificates in our organization and do not want to rely on auto-renew. As our community project, we built a totally free to the public service to monitor certs and alert you when they get close to expiration or are invalid, etc: https://letsmonitor.org https://letsmonitor.org Feel free to use it for any certs.
- j_jochem 9y ago
  Out of interest, what makes you not want to rely on auto-renew?
  - gator-io 9y ago
    It has never worked right on Windows servers (don't know why). And it is simply a check of last resort if something goes wrong.
- the_common_man 9y ago
  LE already sends me notifications by email. What am I missing?
  - pfg 9y ago
    Let's Encrypt's renewal notifications don't cover cases where a new certificate was issued, but for some reason isn't being used by a server, perhaps because the ACME client ran into a problem, or because the server wasn't reloaded. It's useful, but it doesn't quite replace actual certificate expiration monitoring.
    - eropple 9y ago
      This smells like a problem in your server configuration management tooling, yeah?
      - pfg 9y ago
        Not monitoring something you rely on - like the expiration date of your certificate - would be the problem. Assuming that the entire process is bug-free sounds like a bit of a gamble.
doublerebel 9y ago
Shameless open-source plug: if you need a automatic LetsEncrypt module that works with your containerized environment, try ten-ply-crest [0]. Works best with Consul where it automatically registers based on service tag, and can securely store certs in Vault, which makes it a great match for Fabio [1]. This way you can run multiple load-balancers and keep your existing infrastructure while still enjoying all the benefits of LE. Written in JavaScript but works with any stack. Based on the great rawacme, and we'll keep this updated as ACME hits 2.0! [2] [0]: https://github.com/nextorigin/ten-ply-crest https://github.com/nextorigin/ten-ply-crest [1]: https://github.com/nextorigin/ten-ply-crest/issues/27 https://github.com/nextorigin/ten-ply-crest/issues/27 [2]: https://github.com/AngryBytes/rawacme-node/issues/2 https://github.com/AngryBytes/rawacme-node/issues/2
khana 9y ago
You say milestone, I say hacker-noon.
rmc 9y ago
Wasn't the Snowden releases part of the motivation for Let's Encrypt? If the web is "encryption for everything by default", then dragnet survellance from the NSA (etc) is much harder.
id122015 9y ago
I'd like to have the list with those 100 million websites, I didnt know there are so many.
- schoen 9y ago
  It's not 100 million web sites, because Let's Encrypt certificates expire every 90 days, and you have to get a new certificate if you want to add or remove a domain name, and you can get duplicative certificates as long as they're within the rate limits. As I said in my post at https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/lets-encrypt-has-issued-100-million-certificates https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/lets-encrypt-has-issue... it's probably between 17 million and 46 million web sites, although it could be a bit smaller than 17 million at the most restrictive notion of "web site" if you don't consider subdomains to be a separate web site even if they have different content and are operated by a different person. You can see all of the certificates at https://crt.sh/?Identity=%25&iCAID=7395 https://crt.sh/?Identity=%25&iCAID=7395 https://crt.sh/?Identity=%25&iCAID=16418 https://crt.sh/?Identity=%25&iCAID=16418 and you can also get a lot of the data from https://scans.io/ https://scans.io/ or https://www.censys.io/ https://www.censys.io/ (registration required), although the people running it told me in connection with this that their Certificate Transparency data is not as current at the moment as crt.sh's data.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
binocarlos 9y ago
I've been using kube-lego (https://github.com/jetstack/kube-lego https://github.com/jetstack/kube-lego) to automate certs for Kubernetes ingress for the past 9 months. It is a joy to just add a domain to a manifest, kubectl apply and then hit a browser with a certificate working. Thank you LetsEncrypt for making the Internet more secure.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

581 points by okket 9y ago

I think they nail their point with "it illustrates the strong demand for our services." Letsencrypt is cheap (free) and easy to use. Even people with not a lot experience can secure their sites and apps, and it just works. Yes, you have to update it every three months, but that's worth the price and the excellent documentation. Before letsencrypt I always wanted to secure my blog with https but never got around to it or it just looked super complicated and error prone. Then, my provider built its own tool for LE and its just so easy to implement.

dom0 9y ago
acme.sh reduces SSL deployment to fifteen minutes with virtually no maintenance.
the_common_man 9y ago
> Even people with not a lot experience can secure their sites and apps, and it just works. Yes, you have to update it every three months, but that's worth the price and the excellent documentation. This is just a cronjob, no?
- m12k 9y ago
  If you're comfortable with said cronjob having access to your private key
  - tskaiser 9y ago
    If the private key is only used for this purpose, and the cronjob as well as the key only reside on the server, is the security of the key then not a moot point if the server is breached? Genuinely curious.
    - m12k 9y ago
      If you update the certificates manually, then the private key would just reside on your local machine and not need to be exposed on the server.
      - tskaiser 9y ago
        Indeed, but I cannot see how this addresses my question?
        codehenge 9y ago
        because your private key never needs to be compromised, even if your server is breached, because it never needs to be on the server. That said, I agree that if the PK is only used for this single server, you have bigger problems than its loss if your server is breached.
        stephenr 9y ago
        If the key isn't on the server how does software use the certificate?
      - iancarroll 9y ago
        If the server requesting the certificate is going to use the certificate, then the server ends up with the private key either way.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - doublerebel 9y ago
      I don't store keys on the filesystem for two reasons: * Security in case of a breach * Ephemeral containers I try never to store secrets in an unencrypted cloud filesystem, and decrypted secrets should be in memory, if possible. I store my LE keys in Vault using ten-ply-crest, so access is very restricted yet storage has redundancy. Vault is dead easy to integrate with any system. I have been really surprised how many LetsEncrypt tools store certs and keys in the filesystem, other than "that's the way it's always been done". Also if the keys are stored only on one cloud server, that means there ought to be a backup somewhere, so now there are two potential leaks instead of one. With Vault only ten-ply-crest and Fabio access the keys. No human ever gets near them.
  - pfg 9y ago
    ACME doesn't require that the client requesting issuance has access to the private key of the certificate. Access to a CSR (which only includes the public key) would be sufficient. Most clients support a mode where they use existing CSRs rather than requiring a private key, e.g. certbot with --csr.
- HorizonXP 9y ago
  Cronjob with a script that needs to do some back-and-forth/handshaking, but yes, it is.
- philamonster 9y ago
  Yes and no. I ran into an instance where certbot itself needed to be updated and the scheduled renewal didn't take place until I did so the next day. I also use Subsonic @home which requires generating a keystore as the app doesn't yet handle LE natively.
- Intermernet 9y ago
  I now just run all of my sites behind Caddy which takes care of cert renewals for me. Can't recommend it enough!
  - plopz 9y ago
    Until LE goes down and you can't restart your sites. https://github.com/mholt/caddy/issues/1680 https://github.com/mholt/caddy/issues/1680
jancsika 9y ago
I've been very happy with certbot-- the LetsEncrypt automation tool-- and can attest to the ease of use.
kalleboo 9y ago
> Yes, you have to update it every three months, but that's worth the price and the excellent documentation. With certbot it's actually easier to update every three months with Letsencrypt that updating every/other year with a traditional SSL CA.
imron 9y ago
> Yes, you have to update it every three months I don't have to update it at all. A cronjob does that for me now.
techmagus 9y ago
> Yes, you have to update it every three months It can be automated. On mine, cronjob does the job!

pulse7 9y ago

I would like to get a certificate with 3-years lifetime. I know that 90-days will limit the damage from key compromise, but I don't want to automate...

blibble 9y ago
you're perfectly free to pay $10/year for a manually issued certificate from one of 50 other providers
- pulse7 9y ago
  And this is what I'm doing right now... :-)
turkishmonky 9y ago
Why not? There are even docker containers that will do everything for you, all you have to do is tag your application containers: https://github.com/JrCs/docker-letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-companion https://github.com/JrCs/docker-letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-compa...
- chasd00 9y ago
  I use Dokku (sort of like an open source Heroku) and the LetsEncrypt plugin. I can deploy a webapp with a git push and have it run over https with no work on my part. Works great.
simias 9y ago
I was in the same boat, I didn't like having to run python on my server just to renew a SSL certificate. Still, a few months ago I decided to give it a try and I don't regret it. The certbot script is packaged in FreeBSD, it wasn't painful at all to setup and a crontask later it was over. Definitely beats the crappy free "startssl" certificates that I used previously.
- corobo 9y ago
  > startssl I must have at least 4 accounts there due to them using client certificate login. Great proof of concept why certificate based website logins never took off.

mavdi 9y ago

Nearly 20K of them for Paypal phishing sites and who knows how many for others. While a noble intention, one can't ignore the damage they've done.

mixedbit 9y ago
What prevented Paypal phishing sites from buying certificates from other providers?
- mavdi 9y ago
  checks they're supposed to be performing. Some are ignoring them but being punished for it. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39365315 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39365315
  - pricechild 9y ago
    I'd definitely recommend clicking through that article and reading the source of the announcement: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/blink-dev/eUAKwjihhBs/rpxMXjZHCQAJ https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/blink... > As captured in Chrome’s Root Certificate Policy, root certificate authorities are expected to perform a number of critical functions commensurate with the trust granted to them. This includes properly ensuring that domain control validation is performed for server certificates, to audit logs frequently for evidence of unauthorized issuance, and to protect their infrastructure in order to minimize the ability for the issuance of fraudulent certs. > On the basis of the details publicly provided by Symantec, we do not believe that they have properly upheld these principles, and as such, have created significant risk for Google Chrome users. Symantec allowed at least four parties access to their infrastructure in a way to cause certificate issuance, did not sufficiently oversee these capabilities as required and expected, and when presented with evidence of these organizations’ failure to abide to the appropriate standard of care, failed to disclose such information in a timely manner or to identify the significance of the issues reported to them. i.e. they apparently weren't even checking requesters controlled the domain they requested a certificate for in some instances!! And that's pretty much the only requirement for DV certificates? My point is that the legacy ssl providers you're referring to were doing less checks than Lets Encrypt!

michaelbuckbee 9y ago

LE really fills a big need for cert issuance for massive web hosts with custom domains (WPEngine, Hubspot, Shopify are all on LE) as it both greatly reduces the support burden of setting up certs for all of their sites and sidesteps some of the limitations of the legacy cert structure.

pas 9y ago

And most of that is because LE [still] doesn't issue wildcard certs, nor does it really plan to :(

eropple 9y ago
And that is a without-exception good thing. Wildcard certificates are dangerous and encourage bad practices around SSL. You shouldn't use them. Instead, you should fix your workflow to know exactly what domains you have and have active and use automated tooling to provision them correctly.
- F_r_k 9y ago
  I don't think so. I have an industrial VPN with ~300 embedded devices behind them. For some reason the user wants to access to each one of it via https. I thus set up an Apache proxy which proxies https://device_n.vpn.cust.tld https://device_n.vpn.cust.tld to the VPN device (and some auth) LE cant issue 300 certificates and it would be very ugly.
  - eropple 9y ago
    I don't believe LE has an upper limit on its number of SANs. For systems not explicitly public, whitelists are almost always better than blacklists.
    - twothamendment 9y ago
      > I don't believe LE has an upper limit on its number of SANs. The limit is 100, unless they removed that when I wasn't looking. Back in the beta I tried one domain, a handful and then, because I couldn't find a technical reason why SAN should be limited, I tried 500. It fails. I have many certs with up to 100 and would be happy if this changed.
      - eropple 9y ago
        The highest I've seen in the wild is 60 or so, so I'll bow to your superior getting-bitten-in-the-ass-by-it. =) (And if so, in the prior commenter's situation--okay, create three certs. LE might not support 300 certs, but 3 with 100 SANs should work just fine.)

TekMol 9y ago

I still wonder how Let's Encrypt works. I understand that the problem they solve: A user wants to get the public key for a certain domain. So he knows he is talking to a server by the domain owner and not some man in the middle. So he asks a third party whos public key he already has. In this case Let's Encrypt. Ok. But how did Let's Encrypt get the public key from the domain owner? I know they make the domain owner install some software on his server. But how does that make sure they talk to a server by the domain owner and not a man in the middle? Does the software include some private key so they can send them a "hey, encrypt this" message and to prove the server in fact has that private key? If so, why is the Let's Encrypt software so complicated and not just a 5 line script or something?

msumpter 9y ago
There is a nicely done 'how it works' on Let's Encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/how-it-works/ https://letsencrypt.org/how-it-works/
- TekMol 9y ago
  I have read that, but it seems overly complicated. Why not just give the domain owner a private key and a script that is a few lines long. So he can sign a message from them and prove he has the key?
  - breakingcups 9y ago
    In effect that is sort of what they are doing, but simpler. You claim to have domain x.com. LetsEncrypt sends you a token. Place it in a DNS record or in a pre-determined path on your domain and ask LetsEncrypt to read it back. If it matches, it is verified that you own the domain. How is the scheme you propose simpler, whilst retaining the same base guarantee (that the requester is the owner of the domain in question)?
    - TekMol 9y ago
      > in a pre-determined path on your domain That would be easy and elegant. But they want you to install software on your server.

linkmotif 9y ago

How timely. I got my first LE cert two days ago! I used caddy, a really nice http server and proxy that's HTTPS first [0]. [0] https://caddyserver.com https://caddyserver.com

koolba 9y ago

SSL certificate from a traditional provider valid for a year: $10. SSL certificate from a traditional provider valid for two years: $20. Automated SSL certificate generation and deployment via LetsEncrypt with zero human intervention and more importantly zero human intervention to renew it going forward - priceless. --- That's the real value for me. At $10/cert, that's not even a rounding error. But manually generating a new CSR, uploading it via crappy web form, waiting a random amount of time, proving domain ownership by responding to an email (sent in plaintext), waiting a different random amount of time, downloading the new cert (again usually sent via plaintext email), and finally copying it over the old cert and reloading the SSL conf ... now that costs some serious time and time is money.

nneonneo 9y ago
The LE protocol is fully open and even specified in RFCs - I wonder if any paid cert providers will ever move to that type of painless automated renewal (plus automated billing, of course). This would allow folks to potentially get their "advanced" certs (EV, wildcard, crossdomain, etc.) renewed without the rigmarole that you mention (although some cert categories come with their own non-automatable processes). Right now, I have LE certs for my main website and for a test webserver hosted on my laptop, both renewed automatically and painlessly through cron jobs. The fire and forget nature of LE is very convenient.
- dom0 9y ago
  EV certificates are not allowed to be renewed automatically AFAIK.
  - frutiger 9y ago
    That's not a part of the ACME protocol (which is what Let's Encrypt implements), it's a policy decision of Let's Encrypt. Grandparent's comment is about other CAs offering EV certs over ACME.
    - dom0 9y ago

halloij 9y ago

Shame they can't issue wildcard certs. I don't see why they cannot.

techmagus 9y ago
It was, and I think it still is, a very much requested feature. I for one will benefit from it in one particular setup. But so far, can live without it.

tyingq 9y ago

This is an interesting situation where "public good" happened to align well with business goals of some deep pockets. Particularly, Google and Akamai...two of the biggest LE sponsors. They both retain good visibility to user behavior (like specific urls visited) because of things like GA,MITM proxying, etc. But, ubiquitous availability of that is taken away from ISP operators. Which is a good thing. Makes me curious if there's anything else like this that could be achieved. Are there other net public good projects that align well with deep pocket potential sponsors?

pg_is_a_butt 9y ago
eradicating the jews looks good on paper
okket 9y ago
What also may have motivated Google & Co was that ISPs and, further down, hot spots like hotels etc. started to insert/replace ads on unencrypted connections...
- skybrian 9y ago
  Security professionals tend to be motivated to work on improving security because they think it's important to protect users from the bad guys. And it's not like people have a sudden change of heart when joining Google.
  - mirko22 9y ago
    But it is also not like you get to do what you want in big corporations. Rather you do what you have been told, and usually you might not even know the real reason. Also security professional is a person that know a lot about security, his intentions are not necessarily "good" for him to be considered a security professional in my opinion. Very good black hat hacker are also professionals.
    - skybrian 9y ago

asenna 9y ago

Genuine question: Are the other smaller cert-issuing services going out of business? If not, what has been their response to LetsEncrypt? Not that all of them should survive, there are a lot of crappy services that deserved this. But I'm just trying to place myself in their CEOs position and wondering how the game plan should be.

wbl 9y ago
Go upmarket and sell EV certs or codesigning certificates.
- catdog 9y ago
  There are some niches left even for DV like wildcard certs or longer validity periods.
collinmanderson 9y ago
StartSSL effectively died, and I assume LetsEncrypt was part of the reason.
- duskwuff 9y ago
  No... the real reason StartSSL died was because they were acquired by another CA, Wosign, which had a number of serious security and management issues. These issues led to both CAs being distrusted by all major browsers. https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:WoSign_Issues https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:WoSign_Issues
  - collinmanderson 9y ago
    Right, but why did Eddy Nigg sell StartSSL to WoSign? My guess is Heartbleed made him re-consider whether he wanted to keep doing ssl/tls certs, and once Let's Encrypt came along he started looking for a way to get out of it.

cwbeck 9y ago

99M PayPal certs!

cwbeck 9y ago

99M PayPal certificates and counting...

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corford 9y ago

I love letsencrypt but I wish they would hurry up with deterministic dns challenges. It would make securely automating certificate renewal vastly simpler and easier (especially for certs that are being used for non www serving endpoints e.g. mail servers etc). I worry that at the moment there are probably a lot of systems out there that leave DNS API keys lying around on endpoints because it's easier to automate the renewal than write a convoluted two stage ansible role/play that delegates sensitive actions to the controller running the play.

pfg 9y ago
This is due to the CA/B Forum Baseline Requirements stating that domain validation via DNS records (and pretty much all other methods) has to use either a random value or a single-use request token. There's a neat trick with CNAMEs and a separate DNS zone that works kind of as a workaround, if you're okay with introducing another piece of infrastructure[1]. [1]: https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns
- corford 9y ago
  Yeah I read somewhere that they were working to try and get the CA/B rules changed to allow it (no idea if this is true). Will check out the CNAME trick - thanks!

tscizzle 9y ago

The graph of HTTPS percentage has some sudden massive dips a little bit ago. Does anyone know the reason for those?

gator-io 9y ago

The biggest issue we've had is the short expirations. We have 51 certificates in our organization and do not want to rely on auto-renew. As our community project, we built a totally free to the public service to monitor certs and alert you when they get close to expiration or are invalid, etc: https://letsmonitor.org https://letsmonitor.org Feel free to use it for any certs.

j_jochem 9y ago
Out of interest, what makes you not want to rely on auto-renew?
- gator-io 9y ago
  It has never worked right on Windows servers (don't know why). And it is simply a check of last resort if something goes wrong.
the_common_man 9y ago
LE already sends me notifications by email. What am I missing?
- pfg 9y ago
  Let's Encrypt's renewal notifications don't cover cases where a new certificate was issued, but for some reason isn't being used by a server, perhaps because the ACME client ran into a problem, or because the server wasn't reloaded. It's useful, but it doesn't quite replace actual certificate expiration monitoring.
  - eropple 9y ago
    This smells like a problem in your server configuration management tooling, yeah?
    - pfg 9y ago
      Not monitoring something you rely on - like the expiration date of your certificate - would be the problem. Assuming that the entire process is bug-free sounds like a bit of a gamble.

doublerebel 9y ago

Shameless open-source plug: if you need a automatic LetsEncrypt module that works with your containerized environment, try ten-ply-crest [0]. Works best with Consul where it automatically registers based on service tag, and can securely store certs in Vault, which makes it a great match for Fabio [1]. This way you can run multiple load-balancers and keep your existing infrastructure while still enjoying all the benefits of LE. Written in JavaScript but works with any stack. Based on the great rawacme, and we'll keep this updated as ACME hits 2.0! [2] [0]: https://github.com/nextorigin/ten-ply-crest https://github.com/nextorigin/ten-ply-crest [1]: https://github.com/nextorigin/ten-ply-crest/issues/27 https://github.com/nextorigin/ten-ply-crest/issues/27 [2]: https://github.com/AngryBytes/rawacme-node/issues/2 https://github.com/AngryBytes/rawacme-node/issues/2

khana 9y ago

You say milestone, I say hacker-noon.

rmc 9y ago

Wasn't the Snowden releases part of the motivation for Let's Encrypt? If the web is "encryption for everything by default", then dragnet survellance from the NSA (etc) is much harder.

id122015 9y ago

I'd like to have the list with those 100 million websites, I didnt know there are so many.

schoen 9y ago
It's not 100 million web sites, because Let's Encrypt certificates expire every 90 days, and you have to get a new certificate if you want to add or remove a domain name, and you can get duplicative certificates as long as they're within the rate limits. As I said in my post at https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/lets-encrypt-has-issued-100-million-certificates https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/lets-encrypt-has-issue... it's probably between 17 million and 46 million web sites, although it could be a bit smaller than 17 million at the most restrictive notion of "web site" if you don't consider subdomains to be a separate web site even if they have different content and are operated by a different person. You can see all of the certificates at https://crt.sh/?Identity=%25&iCAID=7395 https://crt.sh/?Identity=%25&iCAID=7395 https://crt.sh/?Identity=%25&iCAID=16418 https://crt.sh/?Identity=%25&iCAID=16418 and you can also get a lot of the data from https://scans.io/ https://scans.io/ or https://www.censys.io/ https://www.censys.io/ (registration required), although the people running it told me in connection with this that their Certificate Transparency data is not as current at the moment as crt.sh's data.

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binocarlos 9y ago

I've been using kube-lego (https://github.com/jetstack/kube-lego https://github.com/jetstack/kube-lego) to automate certs for Kubernetes ingress for the past 9 months. It is a joy to just add a domain to a manifest, kubectl apply and then hit a browser with a certificate working. Thank you LetsEncrypt for making the Internet more secure.

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