7 ms·
This kind of centralization is not good. Even thought let's encrypt is non profit and has a very good service record. We desperately need more like it spread ar
by sschueller 7y ago
This kind of centralization is not good. Even thought let's encrypt is non profit and has a very good service record. We desperately need more like it spread around the globe.
- FDSGSG 7y agoWhat problems would decentralization solve here?
- markstos 7y agoImproved security. So many sites are trusting Let's Encrypt and have cron jobs set to refresh data from them. If Let's encrypt were comprised or went offline, they are now a huge single-point-of-failure (or worse, single-point-of-exploit?) for all these domains. It's become a kind of monoculture. A more diverse ecosystem of offerings would be resilient to any single attack or failure.
- beardog 7y agoOn the flip side, more certificate authorities (who, remember, also have the ability to delegate intermediate authorities) also means more attack surface, because except in the case of key pinning (which is rare to my knowledge) any malicious authority or compromised authority's certs could be used to effectively intercept web TLS traffic. If let's encrypt was the only authority, yes that would be bad in many ways (and i'm not arguing for that) but it would mean less authorities to worry about. Anyone remember the bluecoat scandal? https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/78kkwd/a-controversial-surveillance-firm-was-granted-a-powerful-encryption-certifica https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/78kkwd/a-controversial-su...
- organsnyder 7y agoHow would adding additional CAs improve security? By the very nature of the CA trust system, each CA is itself a single-point-of-failure/exploit (though certificate pinning and other measures improve this somewhat).
- buboard 7y agoLetsencrypt doesnt issue certs to Iran, Syria, Cuba, Sudan et al.
- manderley 7y agoThat's due to US sanctions.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mcpherrinm 7y agoRight, that's another reason it would be good to have non-US competition. It's not LE's fault or anything they can do about, but there's plenty of reasons to have alternative options.
- tialaramex 7y agoSure, but it would be reasonable for an outfit to (seek funding for) a CA that isn't subject to US sanction rules. Of course there's a question of where you should put such a thing. Even Russians apparently don't find the idea of a Russian CA trustworthy (they expect that Putin would have his thumb on it, and who am I to argue?), a European CA is certainly not free of American influence, so where would this alternative be based? I don't have a good answer.
- dheera 7y agoStart a LetTheRestOfUsEncrypt.org based in a different country whose government isn't so full of themselves? Or better yet, is there a way to start a decentralized organization itself so that no jurisdiction has absolute power over it?
- henryfjordan 7y agoHow are you going to trust that decentralized org? Is it just voting? Can we all vote to revoke anyone's cert at any time for no reason? What happens when someone performs a 51% attack and takes over google.com's cert? CAs exist solely because you CAN trust them, otherwise what's the point? We'd just have every site self-sign and let the users choose who to trust.
- mmalone 7y agoCompetition is always good. For one, a completely decoupled and separately managed system on a different stack would improve availability of ACME-based certificates. It would also reduce the concentration of trust in one entity. While LE is awesome, the target on their back is only getting bigger. For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure even Let's Encrypt wants to see competitors to Let's Encrypt.
- progval 7y ago> It would also reduce the concentration of trust in one entity. No it wouldn't. If there are 9999 CAs, you need to trust every single one of them. A better argument for having multiple CAs is that it would increase resilience (against takedowns, bugs, money running out, etc.)
- ryacko 7y agoConvergence was a project to have multiple notaries to vouch for a TLS certificate instead of a chain of CAs. There are way to decentralize the internet, but there never will be much interest for it.
- mmalone 7y agoI think you’re interpreting my comment about trust too literally. If you’re talking about “Web PKI root of trust” trust then yes, having two CAs just means you’re trusting two third parties without reducing trust in either. I was using the term more broadly and more narrowly... like, trusting them to be good stewards, trusting them with PII, and trusting them to not configure their DNS resolvers to use NSA-controlled DNS. They have more power and more control and become a more attractive target and more susceptible to corruption because the stakes are higher. Maybe I should have said “concentration of control”. If one CA owns 90% of issuances they’ll be able to push their agenda, for sure. To be clear, all of the evidence shows that LE uses this power only for good. But that’s the threat. 30% market share is probably fine. 90% or 100% would be scary.
- aquabeagle 7y agoLet's Encrypt goes down, certs can't be renewed, people can't access websites securely (or at all if HSTS was used).
- jedberg 7y agoGood practice says that you should be renewing your certs when they have about 10% of their lifetime left, just in case this exact thing happens with whoever your provider might be. It's unlikely they would be down for so long that certs would actually expire.
- jaas 7y agoI don't think a percentage is the best way to think about it. There is a lot of variability in lifetimes and the time it takes to resolve issues is not related to the lifetime of the cert. Just pick a discrete number of days before expiration such that you have a comfortable amount of time to deal with issues. We (Let's Encrypt) recommend renewing with 30 days left, so every 60 days. If your system is automated like we recommend that shouldn't be burdensome, no reason to do it less often than that.
- gerdesj 7y agoAlso, Nagios/Icinga has a handy certificate checker in check_http. If that is a bit too much then logwatch the log and notify on the box itself.
- mmalone 7y agoFor what it’s worth, I’ve run into some issues with this guidance from you guys as I’ve been building out a private CA with ACME support. A lot of ACME clients have hard coded renewal at 30 days prior to expiration, which makes them pretty worthless for managing short-lived private certificates. Using a percentage might not encode a fixed SLA very well, but as a default it does accommodate various lifetimes well. I can see pros/cons either way, just thought you might be interested in this feedback.
- canofbars 7y ago
- the8472 7y agoThey could pull a cloudflare and stop granting certificates to people that are out of moral alignment with them. Or the government could lean in on them require them to not grant certificates to some foreign institutions. Even worse, they could be forced by NSLs to issue fraudulent certs (CT log verification isn't mandatory yet, is it?)
- kakwa_ 7y agoLimiting a bit the impacts if Let's Encrypt is compromised in any way. If Let's encrypt is compromised, either by being able to issue certificate for arbitrary domains or if the CA itself is compromised, the impact would be huge given the current number of certificates signed by it and this number is likely to grow in the futur. With several CAs in different organizations, you have a far lower risk of seeing all the CAs being compromised at the same time, thus limiting the impact of a CA being compromised. Note that it doesn't mean a full decentralization, but rather a set of CAs (5 or 10) independent of each other and providing a service as conviniant as Let's Encrypt. As a side note, an idea a colleague of mine suggested to extend and better the security model of CAs/certificate would be the ability to have a certificate signed by several CAs. Let's say you are a bank or a security sensitive website, you could have your certificate signed by 4 or 5 CAs, and then, you could publish a policy, for example in a TXT DNS record, stating that you need at least 2 or 3 valid CA signatures. This way 1) your certificate doesn't need to be renewed in emergency if its CA is compromised, 2) if a CA is compromised (without people noticing), it reduces the overall impact as an attacker would have to in fact compromised several CAs to actually exploit this (MiM or impersonating websites).
- kanox 7y agoWhat exactly happens if a CA is compromised (private keys stolen etc)? Wouldn't existing certificates before the compromise date still be valid?
- albertsondev 7y agoThat's precisely the benefit of requiring a multitude of CA signatures -- no single compromise is capable of having a catastrophic impact.
- kakwa_ 7y agoIf a CA is compromised critically (private key stolen), then it's removed from the set of trusted CAs you can find in browsers or at OS level (ex: ca-certificates package on Ubuntu/Debian), which in turn makes all the certificates the CA has signed invalid. With multiple signatures, at least, your certificate is still valid as it has at least another valid CA signature. Also, right now, if one CA is compromised and if this goes unnoticed, the effect is a bit catastrophic as it's possible to create valid certificates for any domain. With multiple CA signatures in conjunction with a security policy mechanism stating how many of these signatures must be valid, you mitigate this issue as it would require several CAs to be compromised and controlled by the same actor to issue valid certificates.
- discreditable 7y agoSo if Let's Encrypt has a problem, like say their OCSP server is serving errors[1] then the entire Internet is not affected. https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/may-19-2017-ocsp-and-issuance-outage-postmortem/34922 https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/may-19-2017-ocsp-and-iss...
- falcongod082 7y agoYou mean like Linux and Git, or do you mean like "blockchain brofedora authoritarian lulz"?
- nulbyte 7y agoEven if this is true, nothing prevents another provider from rolling out a similar or better offer. Existing providers could do it today, but they are too busy spreading FUD to rake in profit.
- patmorgan23 7y agoYeah the software is open source, any other CA has the ability to pick it up ajd implement a similar service.
- brianwawok 7y agoYup, but no incentive. They are literally making millions of dollars for a fraction of a penny in CPU time to sign a cert. Why offer the same thing for free? Try to sell it as more secure and trick lots of people...
- rickycook 7y agowho ever said free? they could make a paid service like LE with automated renewals etc that integrates better with enterprise software, or that does better audit logging, or any number of things. let’s encrypt is a great service, but there’s still plenty of money to be made off overzealous corporate security policies
- jaas 7y agoJust so people don't get an oversimplified view of what it takes to start a CA from this comment, you will have much bigger challenges than access to application software. Your first issue will be securing millions of dollars per year for the staff that it takes to run the CA responsibly. Your next issue will be getting trusted by browsers. Also, the open source Let's Encrypt CA software is tailored for how we do things. It's not an "off the shelf" component that you can easily run in another context and end up with a proper compliant CA.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
- quotemstr 7y agoRight. What happens when Let's Encrypt is the only CA and they decide that they don't like you for some reason? All tech companies are under tremendous Twitter pressure not to serve the wrong kinds of people, and this pressure will only intensify. The window of acceptability narrow. Infrastructure diversity is an important check against the ability of vocal but small groups of activists to effectively censor the internet.
- M2Ys4U 7y ago>Right. What happens when Let's Encrypt is the only CA and they decide that they don't like you for some reason? Or, more importantly, what happens when the US government decides you're too brown or Jewish and decides to sanction you? Let's Encrypt has to follow US sanctions, so no more certs for you!
- quotemstr 7y agoGetting caught up in what kind of censorship is most vexing is missing the point if we can agree that nobody should be able to silence people on the internet.