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Let's Encrypt now holds 35% of the market

659 points by tarellel 9y ago

013 9y ago
I think Let's Encrypt is great and their certbot tool makes it even better. With Wildcard certificates coming to Let's Encrypt, I think they will only increase in users. (https://letsencrypt.org/2017/07/06/wildcard-certificates-coming-jan-2018.html https://letsencrypt.org/2017/07/06/wildcard-certificates-com...)
- osrec 9y ago
  Agree with this - it's one of the few missing features of lets encrypt. I think more SaaS websites will be inclined to use the service, especially ones that have user.saas.com subdomain structure.
- frik 9y ago
  How about distributing Let's Encrypt? Do cloud hoster offer a copy of the service from their datacenter? Otherwise it could be a single point of failure / single attack vector, right?
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Distributing a CA makes it less secure, not more; ultimately the thing that "is" a CA is the private key, which ought to be stored in a HSM and never let out.
  - sova 9y ago
    Mirroring Certificate Authorities seems to create more potential security holes...
  - stephenr 9y ago
    Their infrastructure is meant to all be HA from memory, and unless you're doing stupid things like caddy did[1] small windows of downtime shouldn't cause much issue for ongoing operations anyway - you will likely be starting to attempt renewing certs weeks before they expire. 1: https://github.com/mholt/caddy/issues/1680 https://github.com/mholt/caddy/issues/1680
    - hkeide 9y ago
      Wow, that Caddy thing is pretty scary, thanks for pointing it out. I wonder what other decisions like that lurk under the surface.
  - frik 9y ago
    I meant a clone/copy of the (hopefully open) server software of LetsEncrypt stack running as a service on several well known cloud datacenters - of course under a different name. Why? Not a single point of issue. Given now that it has now 25% market share, it's a high profile target, and given he short cert lifetime aggressive updating is necessary meaning you could receive a underhanded cert in case someone gets access to the high profile target. If Let's Encrypt is not a startup and doesn't plan to make money, then there should be no problem to release the whole service as DEB/package so that every big hosted can run a clone under a different name. Or is LetsEncrypt in the business of gathering analytics and selling the usage data? I think no.
    - pfg 9y ago
      Just to clarify, do you want to give every one of those big hosters the keys to the internet, as in either a new root CA or one that's cross-signed by an existing CA? If you're not giving them that, I'm not sure what they would do with just the CA server (which is indeed open source, by the way.) If you're giving them the keys ... well, do you really want to trust every single big hoster with the keys to the internet? They would still have to pass (very expensive) audits, apply for root inclusion, etc., so it wouldn't be as simple as running the Let's Encrypt server stack. Amazon and Google run their own independent CAs already, with Amazon offering free issuance as part of some of their products (with non-extractable keys). I'd expect Google to offer something similar in the near future. I'm reasonably confident that these companies know how to run a CA, but I'm not sure I would trust many other hosters with something like that.
- dijit 9y ago
  I'm quite sad that they're doing the wildcard thing. There are RFCs stating the problems they cause[0]. It would have been nice to steer people away from this awful security practice. I wrote a very opinionated and ranty blog post which goes into more detail ( but strongly implies people lazy :( ) https://blog.dijit.sh/please-stop-advocating-wildcard-certificates https://blog.dijit.sh/please-stop-advocating-wildcard-certif... [0]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6125#section-7.2 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6125#section-7.2
  - lclarkmichalek 9y ago
    > In my opinion if you’re lazy enough to warrant a wildcard cert then you’re too lazy to do security properly anyway, period. You don't present yourself in a way conductive to convincing anyone of anything.
    - dijit 9y ago
      Regardless of the format; the statement still stands, even if it's overly combative. There is functionally no requirement for wildcard SSL that can't be met another way- the other ways in almost all cases are better for user security. Not designing for it (just like not designing for cloud failure) isn't someone being belligerent about nothing it really only emerges out of laziness or unwillingness. (or, you have a legacy application which is architected a certain way, which is similar in my scenario of having a "non-cloud ready" application.. it's not a good reason to architect things in future this way)
    - dijit 9y ago
      I wrote a less combative follow up: https://blog.dijit.sh/follow-up-wildcard-tls-certificates https://blog.dijit.sh/follow-up-wildcard-tls-certificates
  - troyjfarrell 9y ago
    Do you have an opinion on Sandstorm's use of wildcard certificates and randomized hostnames for each application sesssion? [0] They insist that this provides many desirable security features. (Note that the free HTTPS certificates provided by the Sandcats.io service are renewed every week. [1]) [0] https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/wildcard/#why-sandstorm-needs-wildcard-dns https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/wildcard/#... [1] https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/sandcats/#features https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/sandcats/#...
greggman 9y ago
good ! certs shouldn't be only something for people with $$$.
- randomstring 9y ago
  Agreed. Paying someone money for a bag of random bits is criminal.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - icebraining 9y ago
    The random bits are provided by the client. The CA signature is definitely not random.
    - tialaramex 9y ago
      Fun fact: The serial numbers are required to be random! They're unique, but random (since they are huge numbers there's no problem achieving both). This is done because it reduces the danger from collision attacks of the sort which worked on MD5 and are likely to be possible for SHA-1. The random serial number makes it impossible to guess what the signature on the certificate you're getting will be before it's issued to you, so you can't use a collision attack (other types of attack could work, but those have never turned out to be practical on a modern crypto hash even when it's "broken" like MD5). They chose to make the serial numbers random because that's near the start of the certificate document and collision attacks are only defeated by randomness that happens as early as possible in the document.
hosh 9y ago
I'd be interested to see whether the total numbers of SSL sites has expanded because of LetsEncrypt. I remember, one of the arguments that the Comodo CEO had on the forum was a rant about LetsEncrypt attacking their business model. While there were a lot of weird things in that rant, it does seem reasonable that a free service will erode the paid, commercial offering. So I would be curious if Letsencrypt is enabling people who otherwise would not have gotten an SSL cert, as well as the extent Letsencrypt is taking away customers. I would also be curious to see what happens when wildcard SSL certs are launched.
- schoen 9y ago
  https://www.wired.com/2016/04/scheme-encrypt-entire-web-actually-working/ https://www.wired.com/2016/04/scheme-encrypt-entire-web-actu... > And because 85 percent of those sites never had HTTPS before, it's already significantly boosted the total fraction of sites that are encrypted on the web as a whole. Based on numbers Mozilla gathers from Firefox users, encrypted sites now account for more than 42 percent of page visits, compared with 38.5 percent just before Let's Encrypt launched. And Aas says that number is still growing at close to one percent a month. (I work on Let's Encrypt.)
  - CydeWeys 9y ago
    You're a vital part of something my team is working on. Thanks for all your work. Context: https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/broadening-hsts-to-secure-more-of-web.html https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/broadening-hsts-to-s...
  - chias 9y ago
    Let's Encrypt has been of enormous service to me. It's not just about saving money -- it's about changing my perspective and expectations to "encrypted by default". Thank you so much.
  - berbec 9y ago
    This is something that is going to save a company I work for thousands annually. Extended Validation certificates for dozens of domains and subdomains. Now we just plug certbot into crontab and forget about it, forever! Thank you for all the work you do. It is a great service you have given the world at large.
ryanSrich 9y ago
We use Let's Encrypt for new environments at Datica [1]. It's one of better features we've implemented. LE is one of the better companies out there. Truly doing useful work. 1. https://resources.datica.com/compliant-cloud/articles/guides/lets-encrypt/ https://resources.datica.com/compliant-cloud/articles/guides...
shpx 9y ago
I doubt the web will ever be fully encrypted. There will always be tons of people who don't care enough. I've come across dozens of high information static websites that were set up like 10+ years ago where the author will probably never be back to configure tls. It's so strange that you have to ask someone's permission to use encryption[0]. Certificate authorities should've been (should be?) optional. SSH came out around the same time and its Trust-on-First-Use is a much better system. [0] https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/moving-to-https https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/moving-to-https https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_on_first_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_on_first_use
- wahern 9y ago
  The original impetus for SSL/TLS was to permit credit card transactions. For a long time only banking websites and retail checkout pages were encrypted. In that light it makes more sense why the industry focused so heavily on certificate authorities. People were told never to enter their credit card number unless the "secure" icon was displayed; if it did, then they could trust the site much like they would trust any brick & mortar store. Back in the early days you couldn't get a certificate without faxing in a copy of your business registration. A certificate authority's digital imprimatur implied something substantial about the credibility of a site, however imperfect the process. But as the certificate authority market diversified there was a race to the bottom in terms of credible certificate authorities. We've been at that bottom for so long that it does seem ridiculous that we didn't have Let's Encrypt earlier.
  - kunimu 9y ago
    >For a long time only banking websites and retail checkout pages were encrypted. For my experience, this still holds in Japan, and I've heard in Korea.
    - jchw 9y ago
      Anecdotal evidence, but for Japan that seems to be changing. Popular Japanese art site Pixiv rolled out TLS to the entire site in the past year or so, before that it was only used during login. As far as Korea goes, they've got a whole different bag of worms going on, at least for a couple more years. Look up "South Korea Internet Explorer" for some astounding stuff if you've not heard of this before.
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
Side note: I use Amazon certificates (ACM) and I had someone try to "verify me" using Extended Verification procedures, ACM doesn't have EV, it is listed as one of the limitations, but the real question I have is: What is Extended Verification Why would I want Extended Verification Why would I look more legitimate to someone looking for Extended Verification? Because my business/personal information would be associated with the certificate or something?
- detaro 9y ago
  > Because my business/personal information would be associated with the certificate or something? Exactly. EV certs are tied to a business, and said business' identity is verified in the process. Where for a domain validated (DV) cert the CA only verifies that you control the domain/the server it is pointing to, an EV cert also has the business name (and browsers generally show that). If you own ringaround.com, I can register ringaround.io and get a cert for that and try to impersonate your website to users, but I'll have a harder time getting an EV cert for ringaround Ltd. The limitation of course it that this requires users to actually check/notice the cert isn't an EV one, which is why the usefulness of EV is questioned.
  - jamiesonbecker 9y ago
    Actually, only a slightly harder time. If the company hasn't already locked down all the TLD's for their given name, then it's probably a piece of cake to register that company name in some locale and then get the EV for it. (I've done the EV verifications, and they're not really that challenging; and how could they be, since they have to validate companies all over the world, with varying amounts of paperwork, etc.) Keep in mind that companies in the United States are registered (generally with the Secretary of State) in their state, so now you've got fifty different ways of verifying just U.S. companies. Someone registered ringaround, Ltd in California already? Just register it in Nevada, or Florida, or Delaware, or.. you get the picture. Many of these can be registered in about fifteen minutes with a credit card. But not to pick on the U.S.. if you're from outside the country, the U.S. is actually a pretty nice place to base your company. But, if you were the EV company, how would you verify a company in Nevis or Timbuktu? How will you REALLY know if that company is even legit or if the company just hands out "Corp" or "Ltd" or "IBC" to anyone who pays $50 on a credit card? EV isn't quite a joke, but it's not really as useful as the companies pushing it make it out to be.
ToFab123 9y ago
I wish they would make Microsoft IIS a first class citizens. If they are true to their mission they should set any political reasons aside, and provide official support for all platforms. AFAIK there are no technical reasons that prevents them to implement support for IIS and Azure Web Sites. There are a number of user created solution for both, that works well, but i would feel more comfortable with using that in production with official vendor support. So either Microsoft should fund this or lets encrypt should and i wonder why none of them has.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Have you tried asking Microsoft for Azure support of it? Devil’s advocate: AWS rolled their own CA and cert management system.
  - ToFab123 9y ago
    It requires an Enterprise Support Agreement to ask that kind of questions to the IIS / Azure Web App product team and I do not have that. It super simple to buy and add a paid SSL certificate to your Azure Web Site, but a paid solutions is not the topic of this thread.
    - SwellJoe 9y ago
      "It requires an Enterprise Support Agreement to ask that kind of questions to the IIS / Azure Web App product team and I do not have that." Sounds like you're running the wrong web server for your needs, then. Every OSS web server has several methods for getting LE certificates implemented mostly by volunteers (my company implemented it in Virtualmin, both the OSS projects and commercial products, within a couple days of it being available, maybe even during the beta I don't recall exactly, and we're just a couple of developers), and you don't have to have an enterprise contract to make suggestions.
    - kalleboo 9y ago
      > but a paid solutions is not the topic of this thread. AWS has their own CA that issues free SSL certs for their customers for use with stuff like CloudFront, I don't see any reason Microsoft couldn't do the same if they're not willing to play nice with Let's Encrypt.
systematical 9y ago
Honestly I've been holding back on going with lets encrypt at my 9-5, partly because certificates through namecheap/comodo are only $9.95 per year. I'm surprised by how much market share it has already, time to jump on board. I imagine paid for certificates will be dead in a few years.
- blibble 9y ago
  I was surprised how easy it was to setup, and the huge advantage is that you never have to worry about renewals and the various problems associated with forgetting to renew ever again
- gregmac 9y ago
  I recently have been working on moving a chunk of our infrastructure to a fully automated deployment. It consists of several micro services on various subdomains within 3 top level domains. For the dev and staging environments, I used a sub-domain prefix: app1.staging.example.com, downloads.staging.examplecdn.com, etc. There's a script that looks through the deployed systems in it's environment and configures the proxy server appropriately -- including running certbot if needed to get certificates. I used let's encrypt initially so we could actually test real SSL without the hassle of new certificates, especially when we wanted to deploy a new environment. It worked so well we just left it in when we deployed to production. The cost of certificates is nothing compared to the effort to get someone to put it on the company card, renew it (and answer questions about what it is a year from now, yes we still need it), manage the private key, etc. Let's Encrypt is better in every way.
  - joering2 9y ago
    Lets Encrypt provides wonderful services, but don't forget in business when something is free, it might end up costing you money. Not only these certs are for 3 months, but what if their renewal services have hiccups. Not wishing them anything bad, but I can imagine that for whatever reason (including root cert being invoked if they happen to encrypt sites that normally wouldn't do like c.p.) I imagine that 35% of net rushing to a local cert provider to get a paid solution or face no traffic to their site at all. Besides, the times of Thawte's 1999 when single cert was $150 are long gone; you can get a decent Comodo for $4.99 per year these days.
fivesigma 9y ago
Let's Encrypt is great. I would like to see native ECC support and a more stringent validation mode that allows more than 3 months of certificate lifetime.
- jaas 9y ago
  More stringent validation methods won't help with the ever-present possibility of private key compromise. So long as that's a real possibility and revocation is broken (which it clearly is), longer certificate lifetimes are a liability. Renewal needs to be automated so you don't care how often you have to renew. Let's Encrypt will sign your ECC keys now, but we'll sign with our RSA keys. We'll likely have our own ECC trust chain some time next year.
- alwillis 9y ago
  March 2018 for native ECC support: https://letsencrypt.org/upcoming-features/ https://letsencrypt.org/upcoming-features/
raides 9y ago
Putting all our eggs in one basket? This has never gone bad for the security field, right?
- tscs37 9y ago
  Nothing stops any of the big CA's to offer their own ACME endpoint. It's an open standpoint based on software that is on github. Running a ACME authority is not hard. The CA's just don't want to cannibalize their business.
  - tialaramex 9y ago
    At least one major commercial CA does offer ACME to paying customers. If you want ACME and want to use their CA, and have whatever their entry level enterprise price is burning a hole in your pocket, they will take your money. They basically position it as "As well as integrating with Windows we also make everything work automatically with your weird Unix stuff like Apache or nginx" but it's an ACME service under the hood. ACMEv2 (the Internet Standard RFC when that finally gets published) is a bit nicer for a commercial CA because it spells out how you use ACME to say e.g. "Hey, I'm paying customer #383829, here is proof - give me certificates on my account". The only easy way this could have worked in ACMEv1 wasn't terribly compatible with the limited understanding of cryptography that say Steve in accounting has.
- jopsen 9y ago
  With ongoing certificate transparency efforts I'm less worried about this..
- jamiesonbecker 9y ago
  as opposed to... putting all of our eggs in any number of CA baskets, where the CA's are basically random companies of random ethics in random locations and where the loss of any one of our eggs means the loss of ALL of them? It's already gone bad for the security field ;)
gumby 9y ago
Why on earth is it only a third? What value do the other providers offer? (other than EV I mean, but most uses don't require that).
- coldacid 9y ago
  Because some people/businesses are afraid of free things, and others would prefer to not have their certs rotate every 90 days (even if it's done automatically).
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  It starts bearing the question though: Is one CA being over a third of the market a good thing?
  - pishpash 9y ago
    Well, a third of the market that is not that important, over all. I don't see banks switching to LE to save a buck or two.
- morgante 9y ago
  Even though automated renewals are absolutely superior, as encouraged by LE, they do require some work to adopt. For a lot of businesses, it's easier to have someone manually renew every year or two than to do the migration work of setting up automated LE certs.
  - davb 9y ago
    Not only setting up, but monitoring.
- jeffchien 9y ago
  Wildcard subdomains aren't supported yet (but should come in January [1]). [1] https://letsencrypt.org/2017/07/06/wildcard-certificates-coming-jan-2018.html https://letsencrypt.org/2017/07/06/wildcard-certificates-com...
- perlgeek 9y ago
coldacid 9y ago
If all you need is basic domain validation, which is the case for pretty much any site that just wants encryption and doesn't need real identity validation, Let's Encrypt is good enough. Add their tools for quickly generating and updating certs (so long as you're not using IIS) and it's no surprise that they're leading now.
- jamiesonbecker 9y ago
  Agreed, but with the exception of EV-SSL/TLS, certs are fungible and therefore no site needs 'real' identity validation, because you can't actually see the identity anyway (short of running cert patrol or opening up the details page). It's also a crying shame that chrom* hid those details in developer tools now -- when before, at least, you had a fighting chance of seeing crypto/expiration/etc details. (Of course, with DV certs being treated the same as OV certs, someone with a DV cert could just forge all of the metadata, as long as they control the domain; DV CA's don't verify the metadata, by definition.) In other words, I remember faxing data into verisign or thawte back in the day (not even that long ago), but OV is just not worth paying for anymore: OV provides zero value, now that DV certs are accessible. Someone who had access to your domain could just get a DV (or LE) cert and no one would be the wiser. I'm not sad to say that Comodo wrote their own death certificate (ha) by racing to the bottom. It's hard to beat free and open source.. the only thing they've got to hold onto now is EV, and that's of diminishing value now as well.
  - schoen 9y ago
    > (Of course, with DV certs being treated the same as OV certs, someone with a DV cert could just forge all of the metadata, as long as they control the domain; DV CA's don't verify the metadata, by definition.) The Baseline Requirements require certificate authorities to be able to verify the correctness of the information that they include in each certificate -- including for DV. See the first subsections of section 3.2.2 of https://cabforum.org/wp-content/uploads/CA-Browser-Forum-BR-1.5.4.pdf https://cabforum.org/wp-content/uploads/CA-Browser-Forum-BR-...
    - 9y ago
sigjuice 9y ago
I hope Let's Encrypt does S/MIME certificates someday. Almost all major email clients support it.
- tialaramex 9y ago
  Let's Encrypt isn't interested in S/MIME. You are, of course, welcome to try to repurpose their software and/or the ACME protocol to provision S/MIME certificates. Although S/MIME isn't a real Wild West like some types of X.509 certificates, it has seen much less oversight than SSL/TLS ("Web PKI") certificates. There's also not really a great appetite for cleaning it up. If you want to be the hero in this story there's definitely an opening for that.
krisives 9y ago
Does this count parts of the market that will be gone soon? Legitimate question didn't Starcom recently say they won't issue new certs and will shut everything off in 2020?
- kijin 9y ago
  StartCom hasn't had its own market share since late last year when most browsers distrusted it. It's been reselling certs from Comodo and Thawte, probably contributing to the market share of these other vendors.
  - krisives 9y ago
    Thanks for reminding me I had forgotten about that
nurettin 9y ago
Could https be used to track persons on the internet using some phase of the protocol? Perhaps the "random" number generated after a handshake is not so random and actually identifies you as a user? Sure, your communications are encrypted by what people perceive as an infallible algorithm, and all serious websites with forms force you to use it, but at what cost?
- zaarn 9y ago
  > Perhaps the "random" number generated after a handshake is not so random and actually identifies you as a user? If the RNG isn't random then the protocol just broke and HTTPS turns into paperweight. You usually get tracked by your browser and remote IP much easier than tracking details in the TLS connection.
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  What about a session cookie?
  - nurettin 9y ago
    It is obviously very easy to evade cookies and IP tracking, so I'm not even sure why these are suggested. However, if the https protocol itself is bugged at the TLS level, what can you do? What if the last few bytes of the ssl session number are always generated according to your unique hardware specs? What then? I'm aware that this looks a lot like FUD, but it is rather a question, because I'm not peddling an alternative. Why implicitly trust any protocol?
- tialaramex 9y ago
  I _think_ the number you're talking about is the session key. The session key is agreed by both parties. Key Agreement is actually some pretty clever mathematics, but it goes like this (except the real numbers are enormous and I've used small ones): You: "Let's pick a session key, let's use method A, with the magic numbers 15 and 29. I chose my random number, and with A, 15 and 29 the answer was 4." www.google.com: "Cool yes, method A with numbers 15 and 29 is fine by me. I picked a random number and my answer was 3." Now both you and Google can determine that the secret session key is 9, because each of you knows _your_ secret random number and the number the other person got by using _their_ secret random number with the special method. But even if the other person lied and always picks the same number, the _result_ is random, because you did you part of the trick properly. Nobody else knows it's 9, even if they eavesdropped on this conversation taking place, because they need one of the secret random numbers to work it out OR they need to solve a mind-bogglingly hard mathematical problem to get the answer without knowing the secret.
sandGorgon 9y ago
Is anyone using letsencrypt using nginx+docker ? How do you take care of the chicken and egg situation when you spawn a nginx docker container - nginx cannot start without a valid certificate and you cannot generate a valid certificate without nginx. I haven't looked into this for about six months - I just bought a wildcard SSL certificate for 70$ and called it a day.
- osrec 9y ago
  Just wondering, why do you need nginx started to generate a valid certificate?
  - notamy 9y ago
    LetsEncrypt uses having some files able to be served from your webserver to verify domain ownership afaik.
  - klodolph 9y ago
    The Let’s Encrypt client validates your server by placing a file on your website at a specific location. There are other ways too, but this is the easiest.
    - tscs37 9y ago
      If the server isn't started yet, the easiest way is to use the HTTP validation. Once it's started placing the file is easiest. You can use both methods.
- ben-schaaf 9y ago
  Using letsencrypt + nginx. You start with just a http server, letsencrypt does its thing and gives you a certificate, then you set up https.
  - sandGorgon 9y ago
    Manual setup with a running nginx server is easy. It's when you have docker on the mix that it all goes for a toss. Are you using docker to spawn nginx ?
eastern 9y ago
Dropping marketshare for others may not mean falling business. It's possible that the market size is growing fast enough for the commercial ones to actually be seeing a growth in business.
- karlshea 9y ago
  This could definitely be true. I've set up SSL on a bunch of sites that otherwise wouldn't need it at all just because the Let's Encrypt client is so easy to get working.
- ridgewell 9y ago
  I also really wouldn't be surprised if Comodo's market share is inflated from the free SSL certificates that Cloudflare offers for all its users.
  - maddentim 9y ago
    Well, does that make lets encrypt's market share inflated because they give away certs?
  - tialaramex 9y ago
    Is your hypothesis that Cloudflare doesn't _pay_ them for those certificates? How about cPanel and others who bundle Comodo certificates? No, I think Comodo are doing very nicely off this. They've correctly judged that they're never going to be the Maserati in this industry they need to be Ford or Toyota and too bad if some people sneer.
- acdha 9y ago
  This is especially likely given that many sites considered HTTPS in earnest only when Google started aggressively factoring it into search rankings or when they needed HTTP/2 for performance. Search & site speed are a lot easier to make a business case for than privacy, unfortunate as that may be.
- tialaramex 9y ago
  This is in fact the case. https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/ssl_certificate/all/q https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/ssl_certif... Every CA is growing except StartCom who were distrusted by most players last year (and Microsoft, belatedly, remembered this year) and have recently declared they're throwing in the towel, won't try to get back their trust. The big categories which shrank are "None" and "Invalid Domain", ie people who didn't have SSL, or were on shared hosting and never switched it on for their site or whatever.
gh0stbrain 9y ago
I think this is fantastic, it's amazing to see how Let's Encrypt just blasted off. It kind of scares me, one company having such a large presence, but I think it's one of the best companies it could have happened to. :)
IgorPartola 9y ago
It is hard to compete with free. I think if some CA made things as easy as the ACME protocol and the associated tools did, yet still charged $9/year, it would have delayed things a bit. But the end result would have been the same: $0 is the winning price.
- gioele 9y ago
  > $0 is the winning price. The weird (and pleasant) thing here is that the $0 price is backed not by a shady business, but by a non-profit [1] that hires a stellar team of TLS/DNS/Internet experts that does most of its job openly and in a replicable way. [1] Internet Security Research Group (ISRG)
  - ersii 9y ago
    That doesn't mean that things will be pleasant forever. There are plenty of shady non-profit organizations.
    - anilgulecha 9y ago
      Though the stack being FOSS means it's easy to move to a new org when this happens.
      - hdhzy 9y ago
        It's not that easy. I mean the code is there but the infrastructure needs to be provisioned and it takes time to gain trust in the CA world, see CACert.
        tialaramex 9y ago
        CACert is a weird example because their model was completely at odds with how everybody else (yes now including Let's Encrypt) does things. CACert says this is trustworthy because you have to know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody etcetera. The profiles with a single photo of a swimsuit wearing young woman and a generic-sounding name that say they know me from school on Facebook every few weeks can tell you what happens to that idea at scale. In contrast all the trusted public CAs (commercial or not) have a bunch of employees either directly making validation decisions according to some company policy or writing software to automatically make such decisions. In theory maybe CACert's model really could work, but what it definitely can't do is work the same way as everybody else. So it was very hard to get anyone to give them a chance, still less after they started to have internal squabbles. You are correct that gaining trust takes time, but what a conventional CA does (with the exception of maybe Verisign and Thawte which are _really_ old) is they first get an existing trusted CA else to sign a subCA certificate saying they trust the new CA. The ordinary "Let's Encrypt Authority X3" certificate is signed by IdenTrust (it says "DST Root CA X3" on it but the Digital Signature Trust no longer exists). There's another copy of the same certificate signed by ISRG, but that's only trusted in much newer software. Modern Firefox, current macOS or iOS, but not say, Internet Explorer 10
nkkollaw 9y ago
Well, it's free and easy-to-use... They need wildcard certs and they'll go to 90% (some companies will still need to use more "reputable" companies).
- wnoise 9y ago
  Wildcard certs are coming in January.
  - nkkollaw 9y ago
    It's truly amazing what a blow to the industry this will be, and apparently out of nowhere. 99/yr for a cert was too much, though, and everything very cumberstome compared to Let's Enctrypt
sAbakumoff 9y ago
Apparently those 35% do not include samsung.com which does not use https:// https:// at all, really!
- coldtea 9y ago
  To hide the fact that you're shopping from Samsung?
  - zaarn 9y ago
    Crimes like these should not be hidden from the public but should be exposed!
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    To prevent bad actors from intercepting your connection and injecting malicious scripts.
  - quickthrower2 9y ago
    DNS ain't encrypted afaik. Snooper can see that you visited the site but not which url.
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  I wonder why? Great wall?
  - computerfriend 9y ago
    In Korea?
    - quickthrower2 9y ago
      Talking about the site's audience, in China
- sleepychu 9y ago
  What? https://www.samsung.com https://www.samsung.com works just fine. I don't know why they don't have re-direct set up.
avodonosov 9y ago
I hope this will let them to be profitable.
megaman22 9y ago
I get that HTTPS is good for anything that's got sensitive data, but what really is the point of enabling it if you've got a static, old-school informational page? Aside from avoiding getting dinged by search engines?
- pluma 9y ago
  Herd immunity. If only sensitive data uses HTTPS, all HTTPS use is suspicious. If everything is HTTPS, the fact something uses HTTPS no longer makes it suspicious/interesting. It also makes policies banning access to HTTPS websites (i.e. clumsy traffic control) unfeasible.
- lima 9y ago
  ISPs are known to profile their customers by looking at unencrypted traffic or even inject ads. Delivering browser exploits by injecting into unencrypted traffic is common practice.
- C4K3 9y ago
  Authenticity. To prevent somebody from modifying the page against your will, e.g. ISPs/Wifi hotspots inserting ads into all http pages. Example (out of many): https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140908/07191228453/comcast-using-packet-injection-to-push-its-own-ads-via-wifi-apparently-oblivious-to-security-concerns.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140908/07191228453/comca...
- Matt3o12_ 9y ago
  There are a couple of reason. Encryption also preserves the data integrity. That means your ISP cannot inject ads or tracking scripts. I’ve heard that this is already quite common in some countries (including mobile services in the US). This also means that nobody who sits between the server and your internet connection can inject falsified information into that static page. You also have more privacy. An attack can see that you are accessing Hacker News but not necessary what comment section you are on (though it can sometimes be inferred by the page size). You might not care about that about your oldschool static side but someone who lives in suppressive countries might because it might make a big difference if they only access Hacker News for the latest and trendiest node framework or if you actively research the comments about articles how your country does something bad.
rufi 9y ago
i have used its very simple to configure with cerbot and best of all its free
Fej 9y ago
Which (shared) web hosts remain opposed to Let's Encrypt? Namecheap (my host, until I get around to switching) still is, for business purposes. (their customer service rep gave me some BS about "security" as to why, but it's really because they make a ton of money selling certs)
- CamTin 9y ago
  Most of the big hosts have exclusive agreements with certain CAs that prevent them from offering free SSLs through Letsencrypt. They will usually install a cert for you, sometimes for a fee, but never in an automated way, so even if you are using Letsencrypt, you'll need to open a ticket / pick up a phone every 90 days. You can't just write a cron and quit worrying about it, which is the central value proposition for LetsEncrypt/ACME as far as I'm concerned.
- degenerate 9y ago
  Get off namecheap. They got big by standing up to GoDaddy, but their prices are just as bad now. As you said, they make money through their SSLs.com so they will never support LE. They became the villain.
- schmappel 9y ago
  I use Namecheap too. Which host would you consider switching too?
  - AnsemWise 9y ago
    Also wondering this
collinmanderson 9y ago
Would be nice to see the graph in absolute terms. - How much of this is people switching from other companies to Let's Encrypt, and how much of this is more websites getting SSL?
JeanMarcS 9y ago
I'm not sure it's the good way to present this (or phrase it). It's more that their presence enlarge the number of HTTPS sites (or service) by 50% (totally thumb in the wind estimation :-D ) than "stealing" customers to other companies. Of course there's a part of migrating certificates to Let's encrypt, but I find it more important that the HTTPS surface had grown that much.
- tialaramex 9y ago
  For the top 10 million sites examined by w3techs (which looks at sites to see if they use technologies like PNG, WebM, embedded fonts, whatever) HTTPS went from under 15% to almost 50% since they started measuring. Less than half that growth is Let's Encrypt, their growth is still spectacular, but to put things into perspective, if they had the _same_ growth and the whole HTTPS market didn't grow they would now control 110% of the market, yet in fact every other major CA grew at the same time.
m-p-3 9y ago
I'm waiting for wildcard support and then I'll switch.
likelynew 9y ago
Where is cloudflare?
- stephenr 9y ago
  Cloudflare aren't a Certificate Authority, they use Comodo certificates.
BuleBule 9y ago
After spending a ton of money on SSL certs over the years, I not only salute Let's Encrypt but also fart in the general direction of those orgs who fail to support it.
covenator 9y ago
Yet Hostgator does not have LetsEncrypt for shared hosting users. Guess their paid SSL is too profitable.

659 points by tarellel 9y ago

013 9y ago

I think Let's Encrypt is great and their certbot tool makes it even better. With Wildcard certificates coming to Let's Encrypt, I think they will only increase in users. (https://letsencrypt.org/2017/07/06/wildcard-certificates-coming-jan-2018.html https://letsencrypt.org/2017/07/06/wildcard-certificates-com...)

osrec 9y ago
Agree with this - it's one of the few missing features of lets encrypt. I think more SaaS websites will be inclined to use the service, especially ones that have user.saas.com subdomain structure.
frik 9y ago
How about distributing Let's Encrypt? Do cloud hoster offer a copy of the service from their datacenter? Otherwise it could be a single point of failure / single attack vector, right?
- pjc50 9y ago
  Distributing a CA makes it less secure, not more; ultimately the thing that "is" a CA is the private key, which ought to be stored in a HSM and never let out.
- sova 9y ago
  Mirroring Certificate Authorities seems to create more potential security holes...
- stephenr 9y ago
  Their infrastructure is meant to all be HA from memory, and unless you're doing stupid things like caddy did[1] small windows of downtime shouldn't cause much issue for ongoing operations anyway - you will likely be starting to attempt renewing certs weeks before they expire. 1: https://github.com/mholt/caddy/issues/1680 https://github.com/mholt/caddy/issues/1680
  - hkeide 9y ago
    Wow, that Caddy thing is pretty scary, thanks for pointing it out. I wonder what other decisions like that lurk under the surface.
- frik 9y ago
  I meant a clone/copy of the (hopefully open) server software of LetsEncrypt stack running as a service on several well known cloud datacenters - of course under a different name. Why? Not a single point of issue. Given now that it has now 25% market share, it's a high profile target, and given he short cert lifetime aggressive updating is necessary meaning you could receive a underhanded cert in case someone gets access to the high profile target. If Let's Encrypt is not a startup and doesn't plan to make money, then there should be no problem to release the whole service as DEB/package so that every big hosted can run a clone under a different name. Or is LetsEncrypt in the business of gathering analytics and selling the usage data? I think no.
  - pfg 9y ago
    Just to clarify, do you want to give every one of those big hosters the keys to the internet, as in either a new root CA or one that's cross-signed by an existing CA? If you're not giving them that, I'm not sure what they would do with just the CA server (which is indeed open source, by the way.) If you're giving them the keys ... well, do you really want to trust every single big hoster with the keys to the internet? They would still have to pass (very expensive) audits, apply for root inclusion, etc., so it wouldn't be as simple as running the Let's Encrypt server stack. Amazon and Google run their own independent CAs already, with Amazon offering free issuance as part of some of their products (with non-extractable keys). I'd expect Google to offer something similar in the near future. I'm reasonably confident that these companies know how to run a CA, but I'm not sure I would trust many other hosters with something like that.
dijit 9y ago
I'm quite sad that they're doing the wildcard thing. There are RFCs stating the problems they cause[0]. It would have been nice to steer people away from this awful security practice. I wrote a very opinionated and ranty blog post which goes into more detail ( but strongly implies people lazy :( ) https://blog.dijit.sh/please-stop-advocating-wildcard-certificates https://blog.dijit.sh/please-stop-advocating-wildcard-certif... [0]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6125#section-7.2 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6125#section-7.2
- lclarkmichalek 9y ago
  > In my opinion if you’re lazy enough to warrant a wildcard cert then you’re too lazy to do security properly anyway, period. You don't present yourself in a way conductive to convincing anyone of anything.
  - dijit 9y ago
    Regardless of the format; the statement still stands, even if it's overly combative. There is functionally no requirement for wildcard SSL that can't be met another way- the other ways in almost all cases are better for user security. Not designing for it (just like not designing for cloud failure) isn't someone being belligerent about nothing it really only emerges out of laziness or unwillingness. (or, you have a legacy application which is architected a certain way, which is similar in my scenario of having a "non-cloud ready" application.. it's not a good reason to architect things in future this way)
  - dijit 9y ago
    I wrote a less combative follow up: https://blog.dijit.sh/follow-up-wildcard-tls-certificates https://blog.dijit.sh/follow-up-wildcard-tls-certificates
- troyjfarrell 9y ago
  Do you have an opinion on Sandstorm's use of wildcard certificates and randomized hostnames for each application sesssion? [0] They insist that this provides many desirable security features. (Note that the free HTTPS certificates provided by the Sandcats.io service are renewed every week. [1]) [0] https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/wildcard/#why-sandstorm-needs-wildcard-dns https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/wildcard/#... [1] https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/sandcats/#features https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/sandcats/#...

greggman 9y ago

good ! certs shouldn't be only something for people with $$$.

randomstring 9y ago
Agreed. Paying someone money for a bag of random bits is criminal.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- icebraining 9y ago
  The random bits are provided by the client. The CA signature is definitely not random.
  - tialaramex 9y ago
    Fun fact: The serial numbers are required to be random! They're unique, but random (since they are huge numbers there's no problem achieving both). This is done because it reduces the danger from collision attacks of the sort which worked on MD5 and are likely to be possible for SHA-1. The random serial number makes it impossible to guess what the signature on the certificate you're getting will be before it's issued to you, so you can't use a collision attack (other types of attack could work, but those have never turned out to be practical on a modern crypto hash even when it's "broken" like MD5). They chose to make the serial numbers random because that's near the start of the certificate document and collision attacks are only defeated by randomness that happens as early as possible in the document.

hosh 9y ago

I'd be interested to see whether the total numbers of SSL sites has expanded because of LetsEncrypt. I remember, one of the arguments that the Comodo CEO had on the forum was a rant about LetsEncrypt attacking their business model. While there were a lot of weird things in that rant, it does seem reasonable that a free service will erode the paid, commercial offering. So I would be curious if Letsencrypt is enabling people who otherwise would not have gotten an SSL cert, as well as the extent Letsencrypt is taking away customers. I would also be curious to see what happens when wildcard SSL certs are launched.

schoen 9y ago
https://www.wired.com/2016/04/scheme-encrypt-entire-web-actually-working/ https://www.wired.com/2016/04/scheme-encrypt-entire-web-actu... > And because 85 percent of those sites never had HTTPS before, it's already significantly boosted the total fraction of sites that are encrypted on the web as a whole. Based on numbers Mozilla gathers from Firefox users, encrypted sites now account for more than 42 percent of page visits, compared with 38.5 percent just before Let's Encrypt launched. And Aas says that number is still growing at close to one percent a month. (I work on Let's Encrypt.)
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  You're a vital part of something my team is working on. Thanks for all your work. Context: https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/broadening-hsts-to-secure-more-of-web.html https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/broadening-hsts-to-s...
- chias 9y ago
  Let's Encrypt has been of enormous service to me. It's not just about saving money -- it's about changing my perspective and expectations to "encrypted by default". Thank you so much.
- berbec 9y ago
  This is something that is going to save a company I work for thousands annually. Extended Validation certificates for dozens of domains and subdomains. Now we just plug certbot into crontab and forget about it, forever! Thank you for all the work you do. It is a great service you have given the world at large.

ryanSrich 9y ago

We use Let's Encrypt for new environments at Datica [1]. It's one of better features we've implemented. LE is one of the better companies out there. Truly doing useful work. 1. https://resources.datica.com/compliant-cloud/articles/guides/lets-encrypt/ https://resources.datica.com/compliant-cloud/articles/guides...

shpx 9y ago

I doubt the web will ever be fully encrypted. There will always be tons of people who don't care enough. I've come across dozens of high information static websites that were set up like 10+ years ago where the author will probably never be back to configure tls. It's so strange that you have to ask someone's permission to use encryption[0]. Certificate authorities should've been (should be?) optional. SSH came out around the same time and its Trust-on-First-Use is a much better system. [0] https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/moving-to-https https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/moving-to-https https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_on_first_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_on_first_use

wahern 9y ago
The original impetus for SSL/TLS was to permit credit card transactions. For a long time only banking websites and retail checkout pages were encrypted. In that light it makes more sense why the industry focused so heavily on certificate authorities. People were told never to enter their credit card number unless the "secure" icon was displayed; if it did, then they could trust the site much like they would trust any brick & mortar store. Back in the early days you couldn't get a certificate without faxing in a copy of your business registration. A certificate authority's digital imprimatur implied something substantial about the credibility of a site, however imperfect the process. But as the certificate authority market diversified there was a race to the bottom in terms of credible certificate authorities. We've been at that bottom for so long that it does seem ridiculous that we didn't have Let's Encrypt earlier.
- kunimu 9y ago
  >For a long time only banking websites and retail checkout pages were encrypted. For my experience, this still holds in Japan, and I've heard in Korea.
  - jchw 9y ago
    Anecdotal evidence, but for Japan that seems to be changing. Popular Japanese art site Pixiv rolled out TLS to the entire site in the past year or so, before that it was only used during login. As far as Korea goes, they've got a whole different bag of worms going on, at least for a couple more years. Look up "South Korea Internet Explorer" for some astounding stuff if you've not heard of this before.

ringaroundthetx 9y ago

Side note: I use Amazon certificates (ACM) and I had someone try to "verify me" using Extended Verification procedures, ACM doesn't have EV, it is listed as one of the limitations, but the real question I have is: What is Extended Verification Why would I want Extended Verification Why would I look more legitimate to someone looking for Extended Verification? Because my business/personal information would be associated with the certificate or something?

detaro 9y ago
> Because my business/personal information would be associated with the certificate or something? Exactly. EV certs are tied to a business, and said business' identity is verified in the process. Where for a domain validated (DV) cert the CA only verifies that you control the domain/the server it is pointing to, an EV cert also has the business name (and browsers generally show that). If you own ringaround.com, I can register ringaround.io and get a cert for that and try to impersonate your website to users, but I'll have a harder time getting an EV cert for ringaround Ltd. The limitation of course it that this requires users to actually check/notice the cert isn't an EV one, which is why the usefulness of EV is questioned.
- jamiesonbecker 9y ago
  Actually, only a slightly harder time. If the company hasn't already locked down all the TLD's for their given name, then it's probably a piece of cake to register that company name in some locale and then get the EV for it. (I've done the EV verifications, and they're not really that challenging; and how could they be, since they have to validate companies all over the world, with varying amounts of paperwork, etc.) Keep in mind that companies in the United States are registered (generally with the Secretary of State) in their state, so now you've got fifty different ways of verifying just U.S. companies. Someone registered ringaround, Ltd in California already? Just register it in Nevada, or Florida, or Delaware, or.. you get the picture. Many of these can be registered in about fifteen minutes with a credit card. But not to pick on the U.S.. if you're from outside the country, the U.S. is actually a pretty nice place to base your company. But, if you were the EV company, how would you verify a company in Nevis or Timbuktu? How will you REALLY know if that company is even legit or if the company just hands out "Corp" or "Ltd" or "IBC" to anyone who pays $50 on a credit card? EV isn't quite a joke, but it's not really as useful as the companies pushing it make it out to be.

ToFab123 9y ago

I wish they would make Microsoft IIS a first class citizens. If they are true to their mission they should set any political reasons aside, and provide official support for all platforms. AFAIK there are no technical reasons that prevents them to implement support for IIS and Azure Web Sites. There are a number of user created solution for both, that works well, but i would feel more comfortable with using that in production with official vendor support. So either Microsoft should fund this or lets encrypt should and i wonder why none of them has.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
Have you tried asking Microsoft for Azure support of it? Devil’s advocate: AWS rolled their own CA and cert management system.
- ToFab123 9y ago
  It requires an Enterprise Support Agreement to ask that kind of questions to the IIS / Azure Web App product team and I do not have that. It super simple to buy and add a paid SSL certificate to your Azure Web Site, but a paid solutions is not the topic of this thread.
  - SwellJoe 9y ago
    "It requires an Enterprise Support Agreement to ask that kind of questions to the IIS / Azure Web App product team and I do not have that." Sounds like you're running the wrong web server for your needs, then. Every OSS web server has several methods for getting LE certificates implemented mostly by volunteers (my company implemented it in Virtualmin, both the OSS projects and commercial products, within a couple days of it being available, maybe even during the beta I don't recall exactly, and we're just a couple of developers), and you don't have to have an enterprise contract to make suggestions.
  - kalleboo 9y ago
    > but a paid solutions is not the topic of this thread. AWS has their own CA that issues free SSL certs for their customers for use with stuff like CloudFront, I don't see any reason Microsoft couldn't do the same if they're not willing to play nice with Let's Encrypt.

systematical 9y ago

Honestly I've been holding back on going with lets encrypt at my 9-5, partly because certificates through namecheap/comodo are only $9.95 per year. I'm surprised by how much market share it has already, time to jump on board. I imagine paid for certificates will be dead in a few years.

blibble 9y ago
I was surprised how easy it was to setup, and the huge advantage is that you never have to worry about renewals and the various problems associated with forgetting to renew ever again
gregmac 9y ago
I recently have been working on moving a chunk of our infrastructure to a fully automated deployment. It consists of several micro services on various subdomains within 3 top level domains. For the dev and staging environments, I used a sub-domain prefix: app1.staging.example.com, downloads.staging.examplecdn.com, etc. There's a script that looks through the deployed systems in it's environment and configures the proxy server appropriately -- including running certbot if needed to get certificates. I used let's encrypt initially so we could actually test real SSL without the hassle of new certificates, especially when we wanted to deploy a new environment. It worked so well we just left it in when we deployed to production. The cost of certificates is nothing compared to the effort to get someone to put it on the company card, renew it (and answer questions about what it is a year from now, yes we still need it), manage the private key, etc. Let's Encrypt is better in every way.
- joering2 9y ago
  Lets Encrypt provides wonderful services, but don't forget in business when something is free, it might end up costing you money. Not only these certs are for 3 months, but what if their renewal services have hiccups. Not wishing them anything bad, but I can imagine that for whatever reason (including root cert being invoked if they happen to encrypt sites that normally wouldn't do like c.p.) I imagine that 35% of net rushing to a local cert provider to get a paid solution or face no traffic to their site at all. Besides, the times of Thawte's 1999 when single cert was $150 are long gone; you can get a decent Comodo for $4.99 per year these days.

fivesigma 9y ago

Let's Encrypt is great. I would like to see native ECC support and a more stringent validation mode that allows more than 3 months of certificate lifetime.

jaas 9y ago
More stringent validation methods won't help with the ever-present possibility of private key compromise. So long as that's a real possibility and revocation is broken (which it clearly is), longer certificate lifetimes are a liability. Renewal needs to be automated so you don't care how often you have to renew. Let's Encrypt will sign your ECC keys now, but we'll sign with our RSA keys. We'll likely have our own ECC trust chain some time next year.
alwillis 9y ago
March 2018 for native ECC support: https://letsencrypt.org/upcoming-features/ https://letsencrypt.org/upcoming-features/

raides 9y ago

Putting all our eggs in one basket? This has never gone bad for the security field, right?

tscs37 9y ago
Nothing stops any of the big CA's to offer their own ACME endpoint. It's an open standpoint based on software that is on github. Running a ACME authority is not hard. The CA's just don't want to cannibalize their business.
- tialaramex 9y ago
  At least one major commercial CA does offer ACME to paying customers. If you want ACME and want to use their CA, and have whatever their entry level enterprise price is burning a hole in your pocket, they will take your money. They basically position it as "As well as integrating with Windows we also make everything work automatically with your weird Unix stuff like Apache or nginx" but it's an ACME service under the hood. ACMEv2 (the Internet Standard RFC when that finally gets published) is a bit nicer for a commercial CA because it spells out how you use ACME to say e.g. "Hey, I'm paying customer #383829, here is proof - give me certificates on my account". The only easy way this could have worked in ACMEv1 wasn't terribly compatible with the limited understanding of cryptography that say Steve in accounting has.
jopsen 9y ago
With ongoing certificate transparency efforts I'm less worried about this..
jamiesonbecker 9y ago
as opposed to... putting all of our eggs in any number of CA baskets, where the CA's are basically random companies of random ethics in random locations and where the loss of any one of our eggs means the loss of ALL of them? It's already gone bad for the security field ;)

gumby 9y ago

Why on earth is it only a third? What value do the other providers offer? (other than EV I mean, but most uses don't require that).

coldacid 9y ago
Because some people/businesses are afraid of free things, and others would prefer to not have their certs rotate every 90 days (even if it's done automatically).
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
It starts bearing the question though: Is one CA being over a third of the market a good thing?
- pishpash 9y ago
  Well, a third of the market that is not that important, over all. I don't see banks switching to LE to save a buck or two.
morgante 9y ago
Even though automated renewals are absolutely superior, as encouraged by LE, they do require some work to adopt. For a lot of businesses, it's easier to have someone manually renew every year or two than to do the migration work of setting up automated LE certs.
- davb 9y ago
  Not only setting up, but monitoring.
jeffchien 9y ago
Wildcard subdomains aren't supported yet (but should come in January [1]). [1] https://letsencrypt.org/2017/07/06/wildcard-certificates-coming-jan-2018.html https://letsencrypt.org/2017/07/06/wildcard-certificates-com...
perlgeek 9y ago

coldacid 9y ago

If all you need is basic domain validation, which is the case for pretty much any site that just wants encryption and doesn't need real identity validation, Let's Encrypt is good enough. Add their tools for quickly generating and updating certs (so long as you're not using IIS) and it's no surprise that they're leading now.

jamiesonbecker 9y ago
Agreed, but with the exception of EV-SSL/TLS, certs are fungible and therefore no site needs 'real' identity validation, because you can't actually see the identity anyway (short of running cert patrol or opening up the details page). It's also a crying shame that chrom* hid those details in developer tools now -- when before, at least, you had a fighting chance of seeing crypto/expiration/etc details. (Of course, with DV certs being treated the same as OV certs, someone with a DV cert could just forge all of the metadata, as long as they control the domain; DV CA's don't verify the metadata, by definition.) In other words, I remember faxing data into verisign or thawte back in the day (not even that long ago), but OV is just not worth paying for anymore: OV provides zero value, now that DV certs are accessible. Someone who had access to your domain could just get a DV (or LE) cert and no one would be the wiser. I'm not sad to say that Comodo wrote their own death certificate (ha) by racing to the bottom. It's hard to beat free and open source.. the only thing they've got to hold onto now is EV, and that's of diminishing value now as well.
- schoen 9y ago
  > (Of course, with DV certs being treated the same as OV certs, someone with a DV cert could just forge all of the metadata, as long as they control the domain; DV CA's don't verify the metadata, by definition.) The Baseline Requirements require certificate authorities to be able to verify the correctness of the information that they include in each certificate -- including for DV. See the first subsections of section 3.2.2 of https://cabforum.org/wp-content/uploads/CA-Browser-Forum-BR-1.5.4.pdf https://cabforum.org/wp-content/uploads/CA-Browser-Forum-BR-...
  - 9y ago

sigjuice 9y ago

I hope Let's Encrypt does S/MIME certificates someday. Almost all major email clients support it.

tialaramex 9y ago
Let's Encrypt isn't interested in S/MIME. You are, of course, welcome to try to repurpose their software and/or the ACME protocol to provision S/MIME certificates. Although S/MIME isn't a real Wild West like some types of X.509 certificates, it has seen much less oversight than SSL/TLS ("Web PKI") certificates. There's also not really a great appetite for cleaning it up. If you want to be the hero in this story there's definitely an opening for that.

krisives 9y ago

Does this count parts of the market that will be gone soon? Legitimate question didn't Starcom recently say they won't issue new certs and will shut everything off in 2020?

kijin 9y ago
StartCom hasn't had its own market share since late last year when most browsers distrusted it. It's been reselling certs from Comodo and Thawte, probably contributing to the market share of these other vendors.
- krisives 9y ago
  Thanks for reminding me I had forgotten about that

nurettin 9y ago

Could https be used to track persons on the internet using some phase of the protocol? Perhaps the "random" number generated after a handshake is not so random and actually identifies you as a user? Sure, your communications are encrypted by what people perceive as an infallible algorithm, and all serious websites with forms force you to use it, but at what cost?

zaarn 9y ago
> Perhaps the "random" number generated after a handshake is not so random and actually identifies you as a user? If the RNG isn't random then the protocol just broke and HTTPS turns into paperweight. You usually get tracked by your browser and remote IP much easier than tracking details in the TLS connection.
quickthrower2 9y ago
What about a session cookie?
- nurettin 9y ago
  It is obviously very easy to evade cookies and IP tracking, so I'm not even sure why these are suggested. However, if the https protocol itself is bugged at the TLS level, what can you do? What if the last few bytes of the ssl session number are always generated according to your unique hardware specs? What then? I'm aware that this looks a lot like FUD, but it is rather a question, because I'm not peddling an alternative. Why implicitly trust any protocol?
tialaramex 9y ago
I _think_ the number you're talking about is the session key. The session key is agreed by both parties. Key Agreement is actually some pretty clever mathematics, but it goes like this (except the real numbers are enormous and I've used small ones): You: "Let's pick a session key, let's use method A, with the magic numbers 15 and 29. I chose my random number, and with A, 15 and 29 the answer was 4." www.google.com: "Cool yes, method A with numbers 15 and 29 is fine by me. I picked a random number and my answer was 3." Now both you and Google can determine that the secret session key is 9, because each of you knows _your_ secret random number and the number the other person got by using _their_ secret random number with the special method. But even if the other person lied and always picks the same number, the _result_ is random, because you did you part of the trick properly. Nobody else knows it's 9, even if they eavesdropped on this conversation taking place, because they need one of the secret random numbers to work it out OR they need to solve a mind-bogglingly hard mathematical problem to get the answer without knowing the secret.

sandGorgon 9y ago

Is anyone using letsencrypt using nginx+docker ? How do you take care of the chicken and egg situation when you spawn a nginx docker container - nginx cannot start without a valid certificate and you cannot generate a valid certificate without nginx. I haven't looked into this for about six months - I just bought a wildcard SSL certificate for 70$ and called it a day.

osrec 9y ago
Just wondering, why do you need nginx started to generate a valid certificate?
- notamy 9y ago
  LetsEncrypt uses having some files able to be served from your webserver to verify domain ownership afaik.
- klodolph 9y ago
  The Let’s Encrypt client validates your server by placing a file on your website at a specific location. There are other ways too, but this is the easiest.
  - tscs37 9y ago
    If the server isn't started yet, the easiest way is to use the HTTP validation. Once it's started placing the file is easiest. You can use both methods.
ben-schaaf 9y ago
Using letsencrypt + nginx. You start with just a http server, letsencrypt does its thing and gives you a certificate, then you set up https.
- sandGorgon 9y ago
  Manual setup with a running nginx server is easy. It's when you have docker on the mix that it all goes for a toss. Are you using docker to spawn nginx ?

eastern 9y ago

Dropping marketshare for others may not mean falling business. It's possible that the market size is growing fast enough for the commercial ones to actually be seeing a growth in business.

karlshea 9y ago
This could definitely be true. I've set up SSL on a bunch of sites that otherwise wouldn't need it at all just because the Let's Encrypt client is so easy to get working.
ridgewell 9y ago
I also really wouldn't be surprised if Comodo's market share is inflated from the free SSL certificates that Cloudflare offers for all its users.
- maddentim 9y ago
  Well, does that make lets encrypt's market share inflated because they give away certs?
- tialaramex 9y ago
  Is your hypothesis that Cloudflare doesn't _pay_ them for those certificates? How about cPanel and others who bundle Comodo certificates? No, I think Comodo are doing very nicely off this. They've correctly judged that they're never going to be the Maserati in this industry they need to be Ford or Toyota and too bad if some people sneer.
acdha 9y ago
This is especially likely given that many sites considered HTTPS in earnest only when Google started aggressively factoring it into search rankings or when they needed HTTP/2 for performance. Search & site speed are a lot easier to make a business case for than privacy, unfortunate as that may be.
tialaramex 9y ago
This is in fact the case. https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/ssl_certificate/all/q https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/ssl_certif... Every CA is growing except StartCom who were distrusted by most players last year (and Microsoft, belatedly, remembered this year) and have recently declared they're throwing in the towel, won't try to get back their trust. The big categories which shrank are "None" and "Invalid Domain", ie people who didn't have SSL, or were on shared hosting and never switched it on for their site or whatever.

gh0stbrain 9y ago

I think this is fantastic, it's amazing to see how Let's Encrypt just blasted off. It kind of scares me, one company having such a large presence, but I think it's one of the best companies it could have happened to. :)

IgorPartola 9y ago

It is hard to compete with free. I think if some CA made things as easy as the ACME protocol and the associated tools did, yet still charged $9/year, it would have delayed things a bit. But the end result would have been the same: $0 is the winning price.

gioele 9y ago
> $0 is the winning price. The weird (and pleasant) thing here is that the $0 price is backed not by a shady business, but by a non-profit [1] that hires a stellar team of TLS/DNS/Internet experts that does most of its job openly and in a replicable way. [1] Internet Security Research Group (ISRG)
- ersii 9y ago
  That doesn't mean that things will be pleasant forever. There are plenty of shady non-profit organizations.
  - anilgulecha 9y ago
    Though the stack being FOSS means it's easy to move to a new org when this happens.
    - hdhzy 9y ago
      It's not that easy. I mean the code is there but the infrastructure needs to be provisioned and it takes time to gain trust in the CA world, see CACert.
      - tialaramex 9y ago
        CACert is a weird example because their model was completely at odds with how everybody else (yes now including Let's Encrypt) does things. CACert says this is trustworthy because you have to know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody etcetera. The profiles with a single photo of a swimsuit wearing young woman and a generic-sounding name that say they know me from school on Facebook every few weeks can tell you what happens to that idea at scale. In contrast all the trusted public CAs (commercial or not) have a bunch of employees either directly making validation decisions according to some company policy or writing software to automatically make such decisions. In theory maybe CACert's model really could work, but what it definitely can't do is work the same way as everybody else. So it was very hard to get anyone to give them a chance, still less after they started to have internal squabbles. You are correct that gaining trust takes time, but what a conventional CA does (with the exception of maybe Verisign and Thawte which are _really_ old) is they first get an existing trusted CA else to sign a subCA certificate saying they trust the new CA. The ordinary "Let's Encrypt Authority X3" certificate is signed by IdenTrust (it says "DST Root CA X3" on it but the Digital Signature Trust no longer exists). There's another copy of the same certificate signed by ISRG, but that's only trusted in much newer software. Modern Firefox, current macOS or iOS, but not say, Internet Explorer 10

nkkollaw 9y ago

Well, it's free and easy-to-use... They need wildcard certs and they'll go to 90% (some companies will still need to use more "reputable" companies).

wnoise 9y ago
Wildcard certs are coming in January.
- nkkollaw 9y ago
  It's truly amazing what a blow to the industry this will be, and apparently out of nowhere. 99/yr for a cert was too much, though, and everything very cumberstome compared to Let's Enctrypt

sAbakumoff 9y ago

Apparently those 35% do not include samsung.com which does not use https:// https:// at all, really!

coldtea 9y ago
To hide the fact that you're shopping from Samsung?
- zaarn 9y ago
  Crimes like these should not be hidden from the public but should be exposed!
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  To prevent bad actors from intercepting your connection and injecting malicious scripts.
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  DNS ain't encrypted afaik. Snooper can see that you visited the site but not which url.
quickthrower2 9y ago
I wonder why? Great wall?
- computerfriend 9y ago
  In Korea?
  - quickthrower2 9y ago
    Talking about the site's audience, in China
sleepychu 9y ago
What? https://www.samsung.com https://www.samsung.com works just fine. I don't know why they don't have re-direct set up.

avodonosov 9y ago

I hope this will let them to be profitable.

megaman22 9y ago

I get that HTTPS is good for anything that's got sensitive data, but what really is the point of enabling it if you've got a static, old-school informational page? Aside from avoiding getting dinged by search engines?

pluma 9y ago
Herd immunity. If only sensitive data uses HTTPS, all HTTPS use is suspicious. If everything is HTTPS, the fact something uses HTTPS no longer makes it suspicious/interesting. It also makes policies banning access to HTTPS websites (i.e. clumsy traffic control) unfeasible.
lima 9y ago
ISPs are known to profile their customers by looking at unencrypted traffic or even inject ads. Delivering browser exploits by injecting into unencrypted traffic is common practice.
C4K3 9y ago
Authenticity. To prevent somebody from modifying the page against your will, e.g. ISPs/Wifi hotspots inserting ads into all http pages. Example (out of many): https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140908/07191228453/comcast-using-packet-injection-to-push-its-own-ads-via-wifi-apparently-oblivious-to-security-concerns.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140908/07191228453/comca...
Matt3o12_ 9y ago
There are a couple of reason. Encryption also preserves the data integrity. That means your ISP cannot inject ads or tracking scripts. I’ve heard that this is already quite common in some countries (including mobile services in the US). This also means that nobody who sits between the server and your internet connection can inject falsified information into that static page. You also have more privacy. An attack can see that you are accessing Hacker News but not necessary what comment section you are on (though it can sometimes be inferred by the page size). You might not care about that about your oldschool static side but someone who lives in suppressive countries might because it might make a big difference if they only access Hacker News for the latest and trendiest node framework or if you actively research the comments about articles how your country does something bad.

rufi 9y ago

i have used its very simple to configure with cerbot and best of all its free

Fej 9y ago

Which (shared) web hosts remain opposed to Let's Encrypt? Namecheap (my host, until I get around to switching) still is, for business purposes. (their customer service rep gave me some BS about "security" as to why, but it's really because they make a ton of money selling certs)

CamTin 9y ago
Most of the big hosts have exclusive agreements with certain CAs that prevent them from offering free SSLs through Letsencrypt. They will usually install a cert for you, sometimes for a fee, but never in an automated way, so even if you are using Letsencrypt, you'll need to open a ticket / pick up a phone every 90 days. You can't just write a cron and quit worrying about it, which is the central value proposition for LetsEncrypt/ACME as far as I'm concerned.
degenerate 9y ago
Get off namecheap. They got big by standing up to GoDaddy, but their prices are just as bad now. As you said, they make money through their SSLs.com so they will never support LE. They became the villain.
schmappel 9y ago
I use Namecheap too. Which host would you consider switching too?
- AnsemWise 9y ago
  Also wondering this

collinmanderson 9y ago

Would be nice to see the graph in absolute terms. - How much of this is people switching from other companies to Let's Encrypt, and how much of this is more websites getting SSL?

JeanMarcS 9y ago

I'm not sure it's the good way to present this (or phrase it). It's more that their presence enlarge the number of HTTPS sites (or service) by 50% (totally thumb in the wind estimation :-D ) than "stealing" customers to other companies. Of course there's a part of migrating certificates to Let's encrypt, but I find it more important that the HTTPS surface had grown that much.

tialaramex 9y ago
For the top 10 million sites examined by w3techs (which looks at sites to see if they use technologies like PNG, WebM, embedded fonts, whatever) HTTPS went from under 15% to almost 50% since they started measuring. Less than half that growth is Let's Encrypt, their growth is still spectacular, but to put things into perspective, if they had the _same_ growth and the whole HTTPS market didn't grow they would now control 110% of the market, yet in fact every other major CA grew at the same time.

m-p-3 9y ago

I'm waiting for wildcard support and then I'll switch.

likelynew 9y ago

Where is cloudflare?

stephenr 9y ago
Cloudflare aren't a Certificate Authority, they use Comodo certificates.

BuleBule 9y ago

After spending a ton of money on SSL certs over the years, I not only salute Let's Encrypt but also fart in the general direction of those orgs who fail to support it.

covenator 9y ago

Yet Hostgator does not have LetsEncrypt for shared hosting users. Guess their paid SSL is too profitable.