5 ms·

certificates costs money and the world was mostly manual in the past (and in a lot of places still is) you can still order a 3 year cert.

• yeukhon 9y ago
  Also, many CA don’t provide programmatic way to order and to download cert. Another annoying manual step, especially consider having multi-domains not convered under a single wildcard. Sadly let’s encrypt does not support wildcard... and support for intranet is controversial to thosr who want to keep their intranet “totally private”. I love the autobot. One command to generate new cert, another command to reload my Nginx.
  • JetSpiegel 9y ago
    Let's Encrypt will support wildcards in January 2018.
    • CaliforniaKarl 9y ago
      The issue we've run into with Let's Encrypt, is that they have a limit on the number of new (non-renewal) certs in a time period, grouped by high-level domain. So, for example, when you have lots of separate groups running sites until a common domain (groupa.example.com, groupb.example.com), you often hit the new-issuance limit, and have to wait. So, I expect existing CAs (and groups like InCommon) will continue to be around to serve large entities.
      • majewsky 9y ago
        Wildcard certs should help with that. Also, the limit is only on certs, not on domains. If your process allows for issuing a single cert for 100 domains, that also solves the problem. (There is a limit on SANs per cert AFAIK, but I don't have the exact number.)
        • viraptor 9y ago
          If you're dealing with a large scale deployment that involves many endpoints (and not just subdomain-per-user scenario), there are good reasons not to use a wildcard. Other CAs will definitely stay in business there.
          • gregmac 9y ago
            > there are good reasons not to use a wildcard. Such as?
            • viraptor 9y ago
              Example: Imagine Microsoft giving anyone "(wildcard).microsoft.com" just because they have a lot of services to deploy and don't want to deal with separate certs. Now, breaking into that service means you can mitm windows updates for anyone and they can't tell a difference. You want to limit the exposure of your certificates, you don't want 50+ teams to share credentials/certs (they're effectively public at that point), and you want to make sure that if you need to revoke the certificate right now, you know you're impacting as few endpoints as possible.
              • ivanr 9y ago
                To add to this, there's potentially a similar security problem if you have a bunch of systems with different certificates sharing the same TLS session caching backend or session ticket keys. It doesn't allow any one system to impersonate another, but they can perform active and passive network (MITM) attacks. For server-side caching, some systems now take into account SNI hostname and use it to prevent contamination. If you're in this situation, it's worth looking into how exactly your backend works.
              • lucaspiller 9y ago
                It is possible to get a certificate that allows to sign other certificates on your domain? For example you call Verisign and they issue a cert for *.mycompany.com, then you use that to sign another certificate for accounting.mycompany.com?
      • mrkurt 9y ago
        I don't know how helpful we can be, but we (and other companies like ours) have much higher Let's Encrypt limits. If it'd make your life better send me an email and we'll help you out.
    • apple4ever 9y ago
      Finally! Now they just need to add support for specifying cert length from 10-360 days.
      • kuschku 9y ago
        They won’t ever offer > 90 days, but certificate lengths of about a day would certainly be interesting. I’d certainly switch to 24h valid certificates as soon as possible. Ideally even separate certs for every subdomain, but as Let’s Encrypt has cert limits, and I want to avoid SNI in the future, I’ll probably have to use wildcard certs.
        • icebraining 9y ago
          Curious, why do you want to avoid SNI?
          • deleted 9y ago
            [deleted]
          • kuschku 9y ago
            Basically, I am against SNIs today's implementation, and want to allow people who disable it to visit my sites. SNI transmits the host unencrypted, that is a real security issue.
            • jsmthrowaway 9y ago
              In what sense? An attacker can already see the endpoints of a TLS conversation, and worrying about hostname disclosure is security through obscurity; the client already divulged the destination hostname with a probably-cleartext DNS query, too. Not worth worrying about. SNI is fine. If hostname disclosure is a security threat, the system needs rearchitecture. Systems that hostname their customers (mycompany.example.com) should use wildcards for that scenario instead of SNI, among other reasons. That’s the only possible concern I can imagine.
              • 9y ago
  • pilsetnieks 9y ago
    > One command to generate new cert, another command to reload my Nginx. Maybe this is what you meant but you can do it in a single command. For example: certbot renew --post-hook "service nginx reload"
    • merb 9y ago
      that works fine, until it doesn't... multiple servers
• gruez 9y ago
  >certificates costs money you still pay for x years certificate, but you only get a valid certificate for the next y days. if the CA can sign OSCP responses for millions of visitors, surely they can resign a certificate every y days. >the world was mostly manual in the past (and in a lot of places still is) that makes sense when talking about OSCP, but to get OSCP stapling working, you need to configure your web server to do so. instead of standardizing OSCP stapling, why couldn't they have standardized a protocol for a server to get updated certificates from the CA?
  • mrbabbage 9y ago
    > why couldn't they have standardized a protocol for a server to get updated certificates from the CA? That's essentially OCSP :-) In general there's not really a concept of an "updated certificate". A certificate is good if the signature matches, the subject on the cert matches the server, and the current time is within the certificate's validity period; otherwise, the cert is bad. If someone steals a certificate, the website fixes this by telling the C.A. to revoke the certificate and by serving a different valid cert – my old employer kept a second valid certificate lying around in order to minimize downtime in the event of having to kill the main cert. OCSP is a way to effect the killing of the bad certificate. But in the absence of OCSP or some other revocation mechanism both certs are still good. > if the CA can sign OSCP responses for millions of visitors, surely they can resign a certificate every y days. I haven't worked on this stuff in a few years, but historically OCSP resolvers were notoriously unreliable and often down. That's a huge issue for a security-critical path, because you're forced to "fail open" (which defeats the whole point of having OCSP in the first place) or render a wretched experience for your user. One big reason OCSP stapling exists is to work around C.A. OCSP resolvers' unreliability.