> But if someone is able to perform a man-in-the-middle attack against your website, then he can intercept the certificate verification, too. In other words, Le

> But if someone is able to perform a man-in-the-middle attack against your website, then he can intercept the certificate verification, too. In other words, Let's Encrypt certificates don't stop the one thing they're supposed to stop. I guess? But they later state that SSH's trust on first use is the solution... which has the same problem. Am I connecting to the real bank website or a fake one? Who knows! But I'm going to trust it forever. Additionally, most man-in-the-middle attacks occur on the client side (ex. some local network is compromised), which is still prevented here. You would need to man-in-the-middle from LE's perspective. > “But you don't have to use certbot,” say the people who haven't thought very hard about it. And they're right: you always have options. You can renew certificates manually, but Why the fuck did they link to the Youtube HQ shooting here? Anyway, they also link to a bunch of clients that don't do manual renewal. > The entire certificate authority system is a for-profit scam. It imparts no security whatsoever. But Google gets its money, so it's happy. I'm sorry, how is Google getting money from PKI? In the previous section they actually implied that Google might drop Let's Encrypt in order to have their own CA make money. So which one is it? I know this was written in 2019, but since then Google has entered the market (https://pki.goog/ https://pki.goog/), but they didn't boot Let's Encrypt. In fact, they adopted ACME and provide certificates for free as well. So they're still not making money from it. > what to do about it > Not this time. The technical problems are easy to solve. For decades, users of SSH have had a system (save the certificate permanently the first time you connect, and warn if it ever changes) that is optimal in a sense: it works at least as well as any other solution. It's trivial to implement, is completely free, involves no third parties, and lasts forever. To the surprise of absolutely no one, web browsers don't support it. This author has no concept of the real-world. Prompting users to accept a certificate on first use is just going to cause them to always click "trust" since the other option will always break what they're trying to do. A website can then never rotate that certificate without breaking every user that visited their site before. So if the certificate does leak, someone now how boundless ability to MITM everyone that has visited the site, and anyone not MITM'd will now get a security error. Overall this article constantly contradicts itself and merely presents out a poorly thought-out solution as the answer.