9 ms·

I shudder to think about what will happen if they go down for whatever reason. Or get compromised, or the renewal gets bugged etc. It is all cool and great, bu

I shudder to think about what will happen if they go down for whatever reason. Or get compromised, or the renewal gets bugged etc. It is all cool and great, but is it sustainable long term, who guarantees that everything will work in 10 years? Monocultures are not desirable. A ray of hope - you can get a two-year certificate for 10 bucks - so right there, another major benefit of Let's Encrypt, they makes for better competition. (ok I know Apple will stop honoring these starting in the Fall, but I still got two years since the expiration will be for new certificates)

Ajedi32 7y ago
The nice thing about ACME is that it's a standardized protocol, so its really easy to configure most clients to use a different provider. All we need is a few more CAs supporting the ACME protocol, and it'd be trivial to switch over to them if Let's Encrypt ever had a problem. (Come to think of it, automatic failover would be a pretty interesting feature to include in an ACME client.)
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
These points could be stated for any major certificate issuer. They could encounter an availability issue, bugs, vulnerabilities, etc. The funding model doesn't change these risks.
- niks1101 7y ago
  Are any of the other providers this big? 10% of all websites and growing. If the NSA get hold of the keys then it's just like the old days, or am I missing something?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - derefr 7y ago
    > If the NSA get hold of the keys In X.509, the CA never sees the private key associated with a certificate. So while a state actor could always manufacture a “legitimate CA-signed” replacement cert and MITM you with it, they can’t do anything about modern defense-in-depth security approaches like certificate pinning, since it’s the particular public key of the original cert being pinned, not the CA’s authority + CN.
    - tialaramex 7y ago
      Pinning can be used with anything in the chain not just your leaf. Some pinning strategies assume a particular CA is trustworthy and pin the public key for that CA, so that they don't need to update with new pins just because they got a new certificate. Obviously you do need to stay on your toes (if you pinned Symantec and then it got distrusted... need to get new pins pronto) but that's true for any pinning strategy. Laziness plus pinning is a bad combination. Like er... keeping tigers as pets and having a toddler maybe?
  - bluesign 7y ago
    It would not work for mass data collection, maybe only on targeted attacks.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
    Considering 90% of websites aren't served by LE certificates, I wouldn't be surprised to hear if one of the legacy issuers had a larger market share.
    - blattimwind 7y ago
      > https://www.netcraft.com/images/2015/11/certauth_all.png https://www.netcraft.com/images/2015/11/certauth_all.png (January 2015)
mytailorisrich 7y ago
The same rule as for any critical system applies: Make sure your site uses 2 ACME providers and implement fallback on failure.
- gregmac 7y ago
  The default setup is to renew 30 days before expiry. If it fails at that point, you still have 30 days for your "fallback" to kick in. I'm not sure it's worthwhile that your fallback is either ACME or automated. In fact, the failure isn't even one that should page anyone in the middle of the night; 30 days gives enough time to manually sort things out during regular work hours.
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    Sure. However, it costs nothing to have multiple providers with automated retries and fallbacks. I like my automated functions to stay that way as long as possible! Redundancy of suppliers (of anything) is a general good practice.
- sschueller 7y ago
  Who else provides free ACME other than let's encrypt?
  - alwillis 7y ago
    Buypass does ACME—https://www.buypass.com/ssl/products/acme https://www.buypass.com/ssl/products/acme
BiteCode_dev 7y ago
This should be a state provided service. Or provided by the UN. Essential stuff like this or root DNS should be a planetary responsibility.
- privateSFacct 7y ago
  Just what we need is to get politicians involved in this. One benefit thought would be they could more easily block access to sites they don't want folks visiting by just denying a CA cert (which would then generate warnings / blocking in many browsers).
  - giggles_giggles 7y ago
    One benefit? Did you mean to say "the most obvious downside" instead?
    - BiteCode_dev 7y ago
      Ok, the more I read answers to my comment, the less I think it's a good idea.
    - majewsky 7y ago
      Looks like your browser didn't render the <sarcasm> tags.
- antoinealb 7y ago
  In a lot of countries, giving the government the ability to issue SSL certificates would be a catastrophe in terms of surveillance and censorship.
  - BiteCode_dev 7y ago
    Didn't think of that. It doesn't have to be just the state or the UN though. It's not about removing all the other actors on the market. But if I make a website on Python programming in french, I'm quite ok using the french gov as a CA provider. I mean, I trust mozilla because it's mozilla. But I wouldn't trust most companies.
mc32 7y ago
The worst thing that could happen is a concern taking them over with select malicious intent.
- syncsynchalt 7y ago
  There's nothing a malicious actor could do by taking over LE that they couldn't do by buying a lower-profile trusted CA more cheaply. LE does not have access to sites' private keys, for example.
hannob 7y ago
Here's the best guess what I think would happen: Some large player - today it'd probably be Google, in the future maybe some other company - or a collection of players would decide that it's in their best business interest not to let half of the open Internet go down. And they'd come to the conclusion that providing a replacement that's basically just "change this url in your ACME software and you can continue do things as before" doesn't cost them too much (Google already runs a CA, as do many other large IT corps) and they should do it.
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  Oh yeah, it'd be great if Google could MITM half the SSL on the internet...
  - parliament32 7y ago
    Cloudflare already MITMs like 2/3 of the traffic on the internet. Personally I'd trust Google more than them. Google may be evil but at least their motives are clear.
    - ignoramous 7y ago
      > Cloudflare already MITMs like 2/3 of the traffic on the internet. Cloudflare (MiTM [0] or not) is on record that 10% (and not 66%) of the all internet traffic now flows through their networks. Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19204085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19204085 [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/keyless-delegation/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/keyless-delegation/
  - brainscdf 7y ago
    > Oh yeah, it'd be great if Google could MITM half the SSL on the internet... How exactly would Google MITM half the SSL on the internet by virtue of issuing certificates via ACME? The private key never leaves the subject's system (the system hosting a website for example). Google would never have access to the private key for which it would issue the public key certificate. Further, if Google abuses its power by issuing a fake certificate for another website and uses that to MITM all traffic to that website, all browsers and systems would remove the offending CA certificates from their trust store immediately. Look what happened to DigiNotar.
joering2 7y ago
> I shudder to think about what will happen if they go down for whatever reason. We would quickly see article and reminder that free means you are not the client :) Just recently I had issues with Lets Encrypt bot. Apparently on new version of Centos it craps out with some incompatible python libraries. Once I fixed it it turned out I am blacklisted from requesting new certs for 7 days, per their rate limits. That made me come back to drawing board for 60-some domains I ran and just purchase the damn certs. They so cheap these days unless you ran a hobby website its just not worth the savings.
- schoen 7y ago
  > it turned out I am blacklisted from requesting new certs for 7 days, per their rate limits The rate limit for failed issuance is one hour, not 7 days. The 7 day rate limit applies when you successfully issue 5 identical certificates; then you have to wait 7 days more to issue a new identical certificate. https://letsencrypt.org/docs/rate-limits/ https://letsencrypt.org/docs/rate-limits/ It's unlikely that you would be subject to the 7 day duplicate certificate limit due to a Certbot dependency problem, because the dependency problem would have to allow Certbot to obtain the certificates correctly but fail to save them properly. (Source: I'm a Certbot developer.) I should also add that I'm really sorry that you experienced an installation problem on CentOS. Dependency and packaging problems continue to be a challenge for Certbot and our colleagues are still trying to find a more universal solution to them (probably involving snaps).
- cuspycode 7y ago
  I had similar problems with that bot recently (i.e. the python bot "certbot"), so I looked around and found a very nice alternative named PJAC[0]. I have now switched a bunch of my domains to use PJAC, and so far it works like a charm. Its only dependency is Java (version 8 or higher). Everything else is bundled in the downloaded artifact, just as it should be. [0] https://github.com/porunov/acme_client https://github.com/porunov/acme_client
- alwillis 7y ago
  I’m a fan of acme.sh [1]. It’s a battle-tested Bash script that handles many different use cases, including many DNS providers if dns-01 is how you roll. I run my own DNS server using Knot and acme.sh supports it. [1]: https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh
sah2ed 7y ago
> ok I know Apple will stop honoring these starting in the Fall ... Do you mind expanding on this? It’s not clear to me what status quo Apple will stop maintaining.
- sp332 7y ago
  Starting September 1, Safari will not honor new certificates that have validity periods longer than one year. I don't have a link to their documentation because the announcement was reportedly made at a face-to-face meeting at the CA/Browser Forum in February. https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/ssl-certificate-validity-will-be-limited-to-one-year-by-apples-safari-browser/ https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/ssl-certificate-validity-wi...
- chabad360 7y ago
  Safari will will no longer be honoring certificates valid for more than 13 months starting September [0] [0]: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/20/apple_shorter_cert_lifetime/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/20/apple_shorter_cert_...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
chrysoprace 7y ago
LetsEncrypt have a backup CA for emergencies such as this: https://letsencrypt.org/certificates/ https://letsencrypt.org/certificates/

Ajedi32 7y ago

The nice thing about ACME is that it's a standardized protocol, so its really easy to configure most clients to use a different provider. All we need is a few more CAs supporting the ACME protocol, and it'd be trivial to switch over to them if Let's Encrypt ever had a problem. (Come to think of it, automatic failover would be a pretty interesting feature to include in an ACME client.)

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

These points could be stated for any major certificate issuer. They could encounter an availability issue, bugs, vulnerabilities, etc. The funding model doesn't change these risks.

niks1101 7y ago
Are any of the other providers this big? 10% of all websites and growing. If the NSA get hold of the keys then it's just like the old days, or am I missing something?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- derefr 7y ago
  > If the NSA get hold of the keys In X.509, the CA never sees the private key associated with a certificate. So while a state actor could always manufacture a “legitimate CA-signed” replacement cert and MITM you with it, they can’t do anything about modern defense-in-depth security approaches like certificate pinning, since it’s the particular public key of the original cert being pinned, not the CA’s authority + CN.
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    Pinning can be used with anything in the chain not just your leaf. Some pinning strategies assume a particular CA is trustworthy and pin the public key for that CA, so that they don't need to update with new pins just because they got a new certificate. Obviously you do need to stay on your toes (if you pinned Symantec and then it got distrusted... need to get new pins pronto) but that's true for any pinning strategy. Laziness plus pinning is a bad combination. Like er... keeping tigers as pets and having a toddler maybe?
- bluesign 7y ago
  It would not work for mass data collection, maybe only on targeted attacks.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  Considering 90% of websites aren't served by LE certificates, I wouldn't be surprised to hear if one of the legacy issuers had a larger market share.
  - blattimwind 7y ago
    > https://www.netcraft.com/images/2015/11/certauth_all.png https://www.netcraft.com/images/2015/11/certauth_all.png (January 2015)

mytailorisrich 7y ago

The same rule as for any critical system applies: Make sure your site uses 2 ACME providers and implement fallback on failure.

gregmac 7y ago
The default setup is to renew 30 days before expiry. If it fails at that point, you still have 30 days for your "fallback" to kick in. I'm not sure it's worthwhile that your fallback is either ACME or automated. In fact, the failure isn't even one that should page anyone in the middle of the night; 30 days gives enough time to manually sort things out during regular work hours.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  Sure. However, it costs nothing to have multiple providers with automated retries and fallbacks. I like my automated functions to stay that way as long as possible! Redundancy of suppliers (of anything) is a general good practice.
sschueller 7y ago
Who else provides free ACME other than let's encrypt?
- alwillis 7y ago
  Buypass does ACME—https://www.buypass.com/ssl/products/acme https://www.buypass.com/ssl/products/acme

BiteCode_dev 7y ago

This should be a state provided service. Or provided by the UN. Essential stuff like this or root DNS should be a planetary responsibility.

privateSFacct 7y ago
Just what we need is to get politicians involved in this. One benefit thought would be they could more easily block access to sites they don't want folks visiting by just denying a CA cert (which would then generate warnings / blocking in many browsers).
- giggles_giggles 7y ago
  One benefit? Did you mean to say "the most obvious downside" instead?
  - BiteCode_dev 7y ago
    Ok, the more I read answers to my comment, the less I think it's a good idea.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    Looks like your browser didn't render the <sarcasm> tags.
antoinealb 7y ago
In a lot of countries, giving the government the ability to issue SSL certificates would be a catastrophe in terms of surveillance and censorship.
- BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  Didn't think of that. It doesn't have to be just the state or the UN though. It's not about removing all the other actors on the market. But if I make a website on Python programming in french, I'm quite ok using the french gov as a CA provider. I mean, I trust mozilla because it's mozilla. But I wouldn't trust most companies.

mc32 7y ago

The worst thing that could happen is a concern taking them over with select malicious intent.

syncsynchalt 7y ago
There's nothing a malicious actor could do by taking over LE that they couldn't do by buying a lower-profile trusted CA more cheaply. LE does not have access to sites' private keys, for example.

hannob 7y ago

Here's the best guess what I think would happen: Some large player - today it'd probably be Google, in the future maybe some other company - or a collection of players would decide that it's in their best business interest not to let half of the open Internet go down. And they'd come to the conclusion that providing a replacement that's basically just "change this url in your ACME software and you can continue do things as before" doesn't cost them too much (Google already runs a CA, as do many other large IT corps) and they should do it.

ForHackernews 7y ago
Oh yeah, it'd be great if Google could MITM half the SSL on the internet...
- parliament32 7y ago
  Cloudflare already MITMs like 2/3 of the traffic on the internet. Personally I'd trust Google more than them. Google may be evil but at least their motives are clear.
  - ignoramous 7y ago
    > Cloudflare already MITMs like 2/3 of the traffic on the internet. Cloudflare (MiTM [0] or not) is on record that 10% (and not 66%) of the all internet traffic now flows through their networks. Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19204085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19204085 [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/keyless-delegation/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/keyless-delegation/
- brainscdf 7y ago
  > Oh yeah, it'd be great if Google could MITM half the SSL on the internet... How exactly would Google MITM half the SSL on the internet by virtue of issuing certificates via ACME? The private key never leaves the subject's system (the system hosting a website for example). Google would never have access to the private key for which it would issue the public key certificate. Further, if Google abuses its power by issuing a fake certificate for another website and uses that to MITM all traffic to that website, all browsers and systems would remove the offending CA certificates from their trust store immediately. Look what happened to DigiNotar.

joering2 7y ago

> I shudder to think about what will happen if they go down for whatever reason. We would quickly see article and reminder that free means you are not the client :) Just recently I had issues with Lets Encrypt bot. Apparently on new version of Centos it craps out with some incompatible python libraries. Once I fixed it it turned out I am blacklisted from requesting new certs for 7 days, per their rate limits. That made me come back to drawing board for 60-some domains I ran and just purchase the damn certs. They so cheap these days unless you ran a hobby website its just not worth the savings.

schoen 7y ago
> it turned out I am blacklisted from requesting new certs for 7 days, per their rate limits The rate limit for failed issuance is one hour, not 7 days. The 7 day rate limit applies when you successfully issue 5 identical certificates; then you have to wait 7 days more to issue a new identical certificate. https://letsencrypt.org/docs/rate-limits/ https://letsencrypt.org/docs/rate-limits/ It's unlikely that you would be subject to the 7 day duplicate certificate limit due to a Certbot dependency problem, because the dependency problem would have to allow Certbot to obtain the certificates correctly but fail to save them properly. (Source: I'm a Certbot developer.) I should also add that I'm really sorry that you experienced an installation problem on CentOS. Dependency and packaging problems continue to be a challenge for Certbot and our colleagues are still trying to find a more universal solution to them (probably involving snaps).
cuspycode 7y ago
I had similar problems with that bot recently (i.e. the python bot "certbot"), so I looked around and found a very nice alternative named PJAC[0]. I have now switched a bunch of my domains to use PJAC, and so far it works like a charm. Its only dependency is Java (version 8 or higher). Everything else is bundled in the downloaded artifact, just as it should be. [0] https://github.com/porunov/acme_client https://github.com/porunov/acme_client
alwillis 7y ago
I’m a fan of acme.sh [1]. It’s a battle-tested Bash script that handles many different use cases, including many DNS providers if dns-01 is how you roll. I run my own DNS server using Knot and acme.sh supports it. [1]: https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh

sah2ed 7y ago

> ok I know Apple will stop honoring these starting in the Fall ... Do you mind expanding on this? It’s not clear to me what status quo Apple will stop maintaining.

sp332 7y ago
Starting September 1, Safari will not honor new certificates that have validity periods longer than one year. I don't have a link to their documentation because the announcement was reportedly made at a face-to-face meeting at the CA/Browser Forum in February. https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/ssl-certificate-validity-will-be-limited-to-one-year-by-apples-safari-browser/ https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/ssl-certificate-validity-wi...
chabad360 7y ago
Safari will will no longer be honoring certificates valid for more than 13 months starting September [0] [0]: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/20/apple_shorter_cert_lifetime/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/20/apple_shorter_cert_...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

chrysoprace 7y ago

LetsEncrypt have a backup CA for emergencies such as this: https://letsencrypt.org/certificates/ https://letsencrypt.org/certificates/