18 ms·

Let's Encrypt is 10 years old now

543 points by gslin 2y ago

pests 2y ago
It feels like just yesterday I was paying for certs, or worst, just running without. Can't believe its been ten years.
- ozim 2y ago
  Can’t believe there are still anti TLS weirdos.
  - dijit 2y ago
    The digital equivalent of a local kebab shop menu does not need encryption. The lack of understanding from us as technologists for people who would have had a working site and are now forced into either: an oligopoly of site hosting companies, or, for their site to break consistently as TLS standards rotate is one thing that brings me shame about our community. You can come up with all kinds of reasons to gatekeep website hosting, “they have to update anyway” even when updating means reinstallion of an OS, “its not that hard to rotate” say people with deep knowledge of computers, “just get someone else to do it” say people who have a financial interest in it being that way. Framing people with legitimate issues as weirdo’s is not as charming as you think it is.
    - pests 2y ago
      You say that until some foreign national gets their kabab order MITM to deliver them some malicious virus that ends up getting him killed.
      - account42 2y ago
        Which is of course a real concern for the average joe.
        pests 2y ago
        I wish for all my fellow humans to be safe, just because it doesn't protect me personally doesn't mean I think it's not a concern.
    - johannes1234321 2y ago
      TLS doesn't just hide the information transmitted, but also ensures the integrity. Thus nobody on the network tinkered with the prices on the menu. Also the Kebap Shop probably has a form for reservation or ordering, which takes personal information. True, they are all low risk things, but getting TLS is trivial (since many Webservers etc can do letsencrypt rotation fully automatically) and secure defaults are a good thing.
      - dijit 2y ago
        There are plenty of websites that were just static pages used for conveying information. Most people who set them up lacked the ability to turn them into forms that connected to anything. They’ve nearly all been lost to time now though, if a shop has a web-presence it will be through a provider such as “bokabord”, doordash, ubereats (as mentioned), some of whom charge up to 30% of anything booked/ordered via the web. But, I guess no MITM can manipulate prices… except, by charging…
        burnished 2y ago
        Huh. Never thought about it that way; replacing hypothetical MITM attacks with genuine middlemen.
        matrss 2y ago
        > There are plenty of websites that were just static pages used for conveying information. If you care about the integrity of the conveyed information you need TLS. If you don't, you wouldn't have published a website in the first place. A while back I've seen a wordpress site for a podcast without https where people also argued it doesn't need it. They had banking information for donations on that site. Sometimes I wish every party involved in transporting packets on the internet would just mangle all unencrypted http that they see, if only to make a point...
        dijit 2y ago
        [flagged]
        2y ago
    - taneliv 2y ago
      I'm always reminded about this by being on the other side of the equation with my car. There is regulation, like mandatory yearly inspections and anyone is only allowed to sell road worthy vehicles. These rules are rather strict, likewise for the driver's license. They aren't impossible to know or understand, but there's a lot of details. However, when I take it to the shop, whether for that yearly inspection, regular maintenance, or because there's something apparently wrong with it, I never know what to expect in terms of time and money. Oh, it needs a new thingamajig? I start to mildly sweat, fearing it to cost six hundred like the flux capacitor that had to be replaced last week/month/year and took two weeks to get shipped from another country. "Ninety cents, and we put it in place for no charge, it literally takes ten seconds", like, I love to hear the news, could have saved me from the anguish by giving a hint when I asked about the price! But need a new key? Starting from three hundred fifty, plus one hundred seventy for a backup copy. Like, where do these prices come from? Actually, don't tell me, I'm a software engineer. I know, I know. I'll just wait until you want your car shop web pages up. Oh, for that you'll need PCI DSS and we can't do that other things because of GDPR. Sorry, my hands are tied here. That'll be four thousand plus tax, mister auto mechanic shop owner.
      - dns_snek 2y ago
        I don't think that's a good analogy, you're comparing a mass produced product to an individualized B2B service that's going to generate profits for your customer.
        taneliv 2y ago
        It's not an analogy. It's asymmetric warfare.
    - sureIy 2y ago
      Irrelevant. Safe transfer should be the default. Your argument is akin to "I don't have anything to hide." You just do it and don't think about it. Modern servers and services make this completely transparent. The kebab guy doesn't need to worry about this as long as they're not fooled into buying from mala fide hosting companies who tries to upsell you on something that should be the baseline.
      - clan 2y ago
        Nah ah. Not. While we might be able to find common ground in the statement that "safe transfer should be the default", we will differ on the definition of "safe". Unfortunately these discussions often end up in techno-babble. Especially here on HN were we tend to enjoy rather binary viewpoints without too many shades of gray. Try being your own devils advocate: "What if I have something to hide?". Then deal with that. Legitimately. Reasonably. Unless you are an anarkist I assume that we can agree that we need authoraties. A legal framework. Policing. So I 100% support Let's Encrypt and what they have done to destroy the certificate racket. That is a force of good! But I do not think it was a healthy thing that the browsers (and Google search results) "forced" the world defacto to TLS only. Why? Look at the list of Trusted Root Certificates in the big OS and browsers. You are telling me only good guys are listed? None here are or can be influenced by state actors? But that is the good kind of MITM? This then hinges on your definition of "safe transport". Only the anarkist can win against the government. I am not. It might sound like I am in the "I do not have anything to hide" camp. I am not that naive. But I am firmly in the "I prefer more scrutiny when I have something to hide". Because the measures the authorities needs to employ today are too draconian for my liking. I preferred the risk of MITM on an ISP level to what the authoraties need to do now to stay in control. We have not eliminated MITM. Just made it harder. And we forgot to discuss legitimate reasons for MITM because "bad". This is not a "technical" discussion on the fine details of TLS or not. But should be a discussion about the societal changes this causes. We need locks to keep the creeps out but still wants the police to gain access. The current system does not enable that in a healthy way but rather erodes trust. Us binary people can define clear simple technical solutions. But the rest of the world is quite messy. And us bit twiddlers tend to shy away from that and then ignore the push-back to our actions. We cannot have a sober conversation unless we depart from the "encrypt everything" is technically good and then that is set in stone. But here we are: Writing off arguments as irrelevant.
    - gotodengo 2y ago
      Their site will break consistently in any case. Running a site in 2024 comes with a responsibility to update regularly for a good reason. There are more than enough forgotten kebab shop restaurant pages that are now serving malware because they never updated WordPress that an out of date certificate warning is a very good "heads up, this site hasn't been maintained in 6 years" If we're talking hosting even a static HTML file without using a site hosting company, that already requires so much technical knowledge (Domain purchasing, DNS, purchasing a static IP from your ISP, server software which again requires vuln updates) that said person will be able to update a TLS cert without any issue.
      - account42 2y ago
        > There are more than enough forgotten kebab shop restaurant pages that are now serving malware [citation needed] There are plenty of organizations that actively scan the web for "malware" (aka anything that the almighty machine learning algorithms don't like) and are more than happy to harass the website owner and hosting company until their demands are met. Security is ultimately a social issue. Technical means are only one way to improve it and can never solve it 100%. You must never loose sight of the cost imposed by tecnological security solutions versus what improvement they actually offer.
    - serbuvlad 2y ago
      I'm really curious as to what you see as the disadvantages of TLS. Sure, the advantages are minor for some services and critical for other services. However, if you already have bought a domain name, the cost of setting up TLS is basically 0. You just run certbot and give it the domains you want to license. It will set up auto-renew and even edit your Apache/NGINX configs to enable TLS. Sure, TLS standards rotate. But that just means you have to update Apache/NGINX every like 5 years. Hardly a barrier for most people imo.
      - dijit 2y ago
        Its better than it was, but TLS has a lot more knobs to fail than even a basic http server does; theres a whole host of handoff thats happening and running multiple sites is fraught with minor issues. certbot is a python program, better hope it keeps working- it’s definitely not kept working for me and I’m a seasoned sysadmin. a combination of my python environment becoming outdated (making updates impossible) and a deprecation of a critical API needed for it to work. The #1 cause of issues with a hobby website: darkscience.net is that it refuses to negotiate on Chrome because the TLS suites are considered too old, yet in 2020 I was scoring A+ on Qualys SSL report. Its just time, time and effort and its wasted mostly. The letsencrypt tools are really wonderful, just pray they don’t break, and be ready to reinstall everything from scratch at some point.
        usr1106 2y ago
        > certbot is a python program, better hope it keeps working There is also https://github.com/srvrco/getssl https://github.com/srvrco/getssl which is a bash script. I have lightly audited it years ago and it did not seem to upload your private keys anywhere... I've used it occasionally, but I don't let it run as root, so I need to copy the retrieved certs into the the server config manually.
        dijit 2y ago
        Theres a bunch of alternative clients and I’ve tried many. Larger point is regarding the fact that its required for what amounts to a poster on a wall: yes, someone can come along with a pen an alter the poster- but its not worth the effort to secure for most people and will degrade rapidly with such security too. So, instead they turn to middlemen, or don’t bother. Theres a myriad of other issues, but, its not as easy as we claim.
  - wannacboatmovie 2y ago
    Can't believe the HTTPS everywhere cargo cult still can't get it through their skulls there is still a place and use cases for plaintext HTTP. In some cases, CRLs for example, they shall not be served over HTTPS.
  - Pannoniae 2y ago
    TLS is not panacea and it's not universally positive. Here are some arguments against it for balance. TLS is fairly computationally intensive - sure, not a big deal now because everyone is using superfast devices but try browsing the internet with a Pentium 4 or something. You won't be able to because there is no AES instruction set support accelerating the keyshake so it's hilariously slow. It also encourages memoryholing old websites which aren't maintained - priceless knowledge is often lost because websites go down because no one is maintaining them. On my hard drive, I have a fair amount of stuff which I'm reasonably confident doesn't exist anywhere on the Internet anymore.... if my drives fail, that knowledge will be lost forever. It is also a very centralised model - if I want to host a website, why do third parties need to issue a certificate for it just so people can connect to it? It also discourages naive experimentation - sure, if you know how, you can MitM your own connection but for the not very technical but curious user, that's probably an insurmountable roadblock.
    - MrGreenTea 2y ago
      Regarding the stuff you safe guard: what are your reasons for not sharing them somehow to prevent that loss when (not if) your drive fails?
      - Pannoniae 2y ago
        I mean, I do! The music I have I put on Soulseek, although the more obscure stuff hasn't been downloaded yet. I also have fairly old video game mods - I don't even know where to share them or if anyone would be interested at all.
        tomalbrc 2y ago
        The Internet Archive?
        account42 2y ago
        You could try to upload them to modding sites (preferrably not onces with a longin requirement for downloading) if you don't want to host them yourself. That can be either general modding archives or game-specific community sites - the latter are smaller but more likely to be interested in older mods. Make sure that whatever host you use can be crawled by the internet archive. Interest is probably going to be low but not zero - I often play games long after they have been released and sometimes intentionally using older versions that are no longer supported by current mods.
  - account42 2y ago
    In general if you need to resort to ad hominens like calling your detractors weirdos then maybe your position isn't as justified as you want to believe.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    I am 99% in favour of widespread use of TLS - but the reality is it means the web only works at the whim of the CA/Browser Forum. And some members of the forum are very eager to flex their authority. If I do everything perfectly, but the CA I used makes some trivial error which, in the case of my certificate, has no real-world security impact? They can send me an e-mail at 6:40 PM telling me they're revoking my certificate at 2:30 PM the next day. Just what you want to find in your inbox when you get in the next day. I hope you weren't into testing, or staged rollouts, or agreeing deployment windows with your users - you'd better YOLO that change into production without any of that. Even though it wasn't your mistake, and there's no suggestion you shouldn't have the certificate you have. As far as the CA/B Forum is concerned, safety-critical systems that can't YOLO changes straight into production with minimal testing and only a few hours of notice don't belong on their PKI infrastructure. You'd better jump to it and fix their mistake right now.
    - account42 2y ago
      I'm probably more critical of TLS in general than you are, but to be fair to LE one of their biggest contributions has been to change certificate updates from a deployment to something that should happen automatically during normal operations. If you have things setup the recommended way your daily certbot/etc run will simply pick up a new certificate and loat it into whatever servers that need it without you having to lift a finger. Of course in practice it doesn't always work out that way.
      - michaelt 2y ago
        A daily certbot run won't protect you if the CA discovers the problem at 2pm (starting the 24 hour revocation timer) but they only have a fix rolled out by 6pm. Anyone whose certbot run was between 2pm and 6pm would get their cert revoked the next day at 2pm anyway - even if it was only issued 18 hours ago. There's also a higher level question: Is this the web we want to be building? One where every site and service has to apply for permission to continue existing every 24 hours? Do we want a web where the barrier to entry for hosting is a round-the-clock ops team, complete with holiday cover? And if you don't have that, you should be using Facebook or Twitter instead?
  - dspillett 2y ago
    Or worse: people who still go on and on about how self-signed certificates should be accepted by browsers, and can't be convinced that blind-trust-no-first-use is lousy security. They usually counter with “but SSH uses TOFU” because they don't see, and can't be convinced of, the problem of not verifying the server key signature⁰. I can be fairly sure that I'm talking to the daemon that I've just setup myself without explicitly checking the signature¹, but that particular side-channel assurance doesn't apply to, for example, a client connecting to our SFTP endpoint for the first time² to send us sensitive data. -- [0] Basically, they get away with doing SSH wrong, and want to get away with doing HTTPS wrong the same way. [1] Though I still should, really, and actually do in DayJob. [2] Surprisingly few banks' tech teams bother to verify SSH server signatures on first connection, I know because the ones in our documentation were wrong for a time and no one queried the matter before I noticed it when reviewing that documentation while adding further details. I doubt they'd even notice the signature changing unexpectedly even though that could mean something very serious is going on.
  - guappa 2y ago
    My letsencrypt cert, despite all my attempts, works fine with browsers but WILL NOT work with wget/curl/python/whatever. Plus setting up letsencrypt isn't really really easy. Last time it was failing because I had disabled HTTP on port 80 entirely on my server… but letsencrypt uses that to verify that my website has the magic file. So I had to make a script to turn it on for 5 minutes around the time when the certificate gets renewed. -_-' None of this is easy or quick, and people have other stuff to do than to worry about completely hypothetical attacks on their blog.
    - mmsc 2y ago
      >letsencrypt uses that to verify that my website has the magic file. So, instead, use the other authentication methods. For example, DNS.
      - guappa 2y ago
        Is that easier to configure? (no it isn't)
        mmsc 2y ago
        Setting a single DNS record which doesn't need to be change is more difficult than setting a crontab to open port 80 "around the time you expect the ACME challenge"? How's that?
    - ozim 2y ago
      Not really hypothetical. Google "isp injecting ads", well most of it is from 10 years ago - but that is because now we have TLS everywhere. And it is not attack on your blog but on readers of your blog, well your blog gets the blame of course in case they would be infected by malware or see adult ads.
kome 2y ago
thank you Edward Snowden
- vaylian 2y ago
  I wanted to post that exact comment.
mrtksn 2y ago
Hands down one of the greatest services out there, stopped a racket and made the internet secure. I remember a time when having an HTTPS connection was for "serious" projects only because the cost of the certificate was much higher than the domain. You go commando and if it sticks then you purchase a certificate for a 100 bucks or something.
- dachris 2y ago
  There's still enough people out there who don't know better, manually (or auto-renew) purchasing new a certificate every year from their hosting provider like it's 2013.
  - yread 2y ago
    Unfortunately, the code signing certificates work pretty much the same way
  - mrtksn 2y ago
    AFAIK there's things like Extended Validation Certificate Verification that used to make the browser address bar look more trustworthy by making it green but I don't know if its still a thing. At least in Safari, I don't see a green padlock anywhere.
    - sureIy 2y ago
      Yeah that also stopped being a thing. I'm really happy how Chrome and then other browsers gradually shifted the blame to insecure websites rather than highlighting "secure" ones. You'll still find people online clamoring EV certificates are worth anything more than $0 but you can ignore them just as well.
    - Systemmanic 2y ago
      Chrome and Firefox removed the extra UI stuff for EV certs in 2019: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/security-dev/c/h1bTcoTpfeI https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/security-dev/c/h1... https://groups.google.com/g/firefox-dev/c/6wAg_PpnlY4 https://groups.google.com/g/firefox-dev/c/6wAg_PpnlY4
CarpaDorada 2y ago
A lot of people are not aware that HTTPS certificates do not necessarily guard you from certain types of attacks like DNS injection. You can see <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exy5JwAU8qk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exy5JwAU8qk> for one example where an attack campaign called DNSPionage obtained valid certificates for their attacks. To explain the issue with HTTPS certificates simply, issuance is automated and rests on the security of DNS, which is achieved via DNSSEC and most do not implement.
- ta1243 2y ago
  Technically it's an attack against the certificate issuing authority, bypassing their authorisation checks (is this person really authorised to issue a certificate for the domain). Trouble is even CAA entries won't help here (if you're spoofing A records, you can spoof CAA records too). DNSSEC might help against this, I don't know enough about DNS though. Another type of attack is an IP hijack, which allows you to pass things like http authentication (the normal ACME method), but won't bypass CAA records. Can't use letsencrypt to issue a cert - even if you own the IP address my A or AAAA records point to - if my CAA doesn't have letsenctypt as an approved issuer.
  - CarpaDorada 2y ago
    With DNSSEC you can be certain that the response you got was issued by the nameserver that is claimed (well, by someone who owns the private key). The domain owner, and registrar can both be at fault, the CA is the last entity to blame because they are performing an automated check of domain ownership. For maximum security you'd want to buy your own TLD as my YT video talks about, to circumvent any other registries, registry wholesalers, and registrars' security models, but an adequate protection for most is to use registry/registrar lock and implement DNSSEC correctly. IP hijack will then not work when all of the above is done correctly. Another option is manual certificate issuance with a CA whose security model is better than yours, but not implementing DNSSEC leaves you open to other attacks.
    - tptacek 2y ago
wannacboatmovie 2y ago
Nothing makes me trust a site with my payment info more than seeing a LE or domain-validated certificate with no ownership details in the DN.
- aaomidi 2y ago
  The rate of misissuance of EV and OV is much higher than DV.
  - wannacboatmovie 2y ago
    Source? I'm not questioning it, I'd like to know more. DV always seemed vulnerable to DNS tampering.
    - ta1243 2y ago
      And EV is vulnerable to a fancy looking fax (remember them?) Do you really check your site has an EV every single time? Especially now browsers treat them the same? If not, how do you know someone hasn't got a DV certificate for this specific visit? Scott Helme has a thorough takedown of them, and that was 7 years ago when they were still a thing. https://scotthelme.co.uk/are-ev-certificates-worth-the-paper-theyre-written-on/ https://scotthelme.co.uk/are-ev-certificates-worth-the-paper...
    - aaomidi 2y ago
      I’m active in the WebPKI community (you might want to check out my Substack: https://webpki.substack.com/ https://webpki.substack.com/) EV and OV when it includes dns names still requires domain control validation anyway. EV certs are generally manually verified. This means there’s a human factor in the middle of this process. DV certs can, and should, be fully automated. Multi perspective validation is about to be required too: https://cabforum.org/2024/11/07/ballot-smc010-introduction-of-multi-perspective-issuance-corroboration/ https://cabforum.org/2024/11/07/ballot-smc010-introduction-o...
- sunaookami 2y ago
  HTTPS does not validate the trustworthiness of a site. Never has and never will. It only validates that the site has not been tampered with during transfer. Phishing sites can also have HTTPS, that doesn't make them trustworthy.
aurareturn 2y ago
People talk about paying for certificates but one major pain point solved by PaaS companies over the last 5 years is automatically adding certificates and renewing them for your app deployments. It saves a huge amount of headache. In 2024, if your PaaS does not have automated encryption for deploys, I will never use it.
selectnull 2y ago
What I'm most thankful is the ACME protocol. Does anyone remember how we renewed certificates before LE? Yeah, private keys were being sent via email as zip attachments. That was a security charade. And as far as I know, it was a norm among CAs (I remember working with several). Thank you Let's Encrypt.
- ta1243 2y ago
  Just handholding a renewal with globalsign I generate the new key on the server as part of the csr creation process. I run it on the server itself so the key never leaves the server's internal storage. CSR gets sent off to globalsign (via a third party because #largeCompany), then a couple of days later I get the certificate back and apply to the server Would love to use ACME instead, and store the key in memory (ramdrive etc), but these are the downsides of working for a company less agile than an oil-tanker
- chrismorgan 2y ago
  What of Certificate Signing Requests? The whole purpose was that you wouldn’t send private keys around. (I was only slightly involved with a couple of TLS certificates before then, and certainly they enforced the CSR approach, but maybe such terrible practice was more common in the real world that I knew.)
  - selectnull 2y ago
    My memory of the whole process is kinda fuzzy, you're probably right about CSRs. Hopefully the private keys were not sent around via unencrypted email. But the point still stands: the whole process was a nightmare, no automation, error prone, renewal easily forgetable... The large companies could have had a staff to manage all that. I was just a solo developer managing my own projects, and it was a hassle.
- tialaramex 2y ago
  > Yeah, private keys were being sent via email as zip attachments. Internally, perhaps. And also on a small scale maybe with CA "resellers" who were often shady outfits which were in it for a quick buck and didn't much care about the rules. But as a formal issuance mechanism I very much doubt it. The public CAs are prohibited from knowing the private key for a certificate they issue. Indeed there's a fun incident some years back where a reseller (who have been squirrelling away such private keys) just sends them all to the issuing CA, apparently thinking this is some sort of trump card - and so the issuing CA just... revokes all those certificates immediately because they're prohibited from knowing these private keys. The correct thing to do, and indeed the thing ACME is doing, although not the interesting part of the protocol, is to produce a Certificate Signing Request. This data structure goes roughly as follows: Dear Certificate Authority, I am Some Internet Name [and maybe more than one], and here is some other facts you may be entitled to certify about me. You will observe that this document is signed, proving I know a Private Key P. Please issue me a certificate, with my name and other details, showing that you associate those details with this key P which you don't know. Signed, P. This actually means (with ACME or without) that you can successfully air gap the certificate issuance process, with the machine that knows the private key actually never talking to a Certificate Authority at all and the private key never leaving that machine. That's not how most people do it because they aren't paranoid, but it's been eminently possible for decades.
KronisLV 2y ago
Here’s to 10 more years! With web servers like Caddy, software like certbot and even something like Apache2 getting mod_md, I’d say we’re in a pretty good spot! That said, I’m wondering why there aren’t 10 or so popular alternatives to LE, since that seems to be the landscape for domain registrars, for example.
gloosx 2y ago
I really wish something like this comes up for the desktop certification world as well. Microsoft just went full insane mode with their current requirements, and their certificate plugs are making more money than ever without lifting a finger. So funny that all of their security, vetting and endless verifications are standing on a single passport photo sent over an email to this day.
lakomen 2y ago
Time flies when you're having fun. Congratulations
account42 2y ago
I'm kinda mixed on LE. It's nice that you can now get free TLS certs without having to resort to shady outfits like StartSSL. This allows any website to easily move to HTTPS, which has basically elimated sensitive data (including logins) from being sent over unencrypted connections. On the otherhand, this reinforces the inherently proken trust model of TLS certificates where any certificate authority (and a lot of them are controlled by outright hostile entities) has the ability to issue certificates for your domain without your involvement. Yes there are tons of kludges to try and mitigate this design flaw (CAA records, certificate transparency) but they don't 100% solve the issue. If not for LE perhaps there would have been more motivation to implement support for a saner trust mechanism by now that limmits certificate issuance to those entities who actually have any authority to decide over domain ownership, like with DNSSEC+DANE. I'm also concerned with the (intentional) lack of backwards compatibility with moving sites to TLS, which is not just a one time TLS on/off issue but a continual deprecation of protocols and ciphers. This is warranted for things that need to be secure like banking or email but shouldn't really be needed to view a recipe or other similar static and non-critical information. Concerns about network operators inserting ads or other shit are better solved with regulation.
- rocqua 2y ago
  > If not for LE perhaps there would have been more motivation to implement support for a saner trust mechanism by now I would argue that LE has only highlighted these problems, and now actually causes people with power to worry about them. There is a chance we would have gotten something better than TLS if the lack of LE kept certificates a pain. But that seems unlikely to me. Because the fundamental problem remains hard.
INTPenis 2y ago
Config management took me many years to adopt, containers took me about 6 years to warm up to. But LE was something I jumped on immediately. I had worked in web hosting for 10 years already when it came out so I remember faxing your driver's license in order to validate a TLS cert. It just felt like such a scam for so long that these CAs were over charging for something that is just a key signing. But I guess automation and standards had to catch up in order for LE to securely setup their CA.
lambdaone 2y ago
Let's Encrypt is a massive achievement, and is now essential infrastructure. Basing it on an open protocol, so it doesn't become a single point of failure, was a clever idea that allows the idea to survive the demise of any single organization. May there be many more such anniversaries.
brchr 2y ago
Peter Eckersley (1978-2022) was posthumously inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame for his founding work on Let’s Encrypt. The Internet is a better place because of Peter (and his many collaborators and colleagues).
- usr1106 2y ago
  https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/ https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/ None of them I have ever heard of. Whatever that may mean. Edit: On the whole list https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/all/ https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/all/ I spotted maybe seven names. Still a single digit percentage.
  - brchr 2y ago
    Vint Cerf & Bob Kahn (TCP/IP), Paul Baran (packet switching), Tim Berners-Lee (WWW), Marc Andreesen (Netscape), Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive), Douglas Engelbart (hypertext), Aaron Swartz (RSS, Creative Commons), Richard Stallman (GNU, free software movement), Van Jacobson (TCP/IP congestion control), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Mitchell Baker (Mozilla), Linus Torvalds (Linux)... ...but you’re missing the point of my comment, which is simply to acknowledge and honor (my late dear friend) Peter.
    - usr1106 2y ago
      Ah, I missed Linus Torvalds and you might have missed Bob Metcalfe (Ethernet) and Jon Postel (RFC work). My point was not do criticize the achievements of the work of any of those people. 1. I was not actively aware that this hall exists 2. I am mostly critical to such awards in general. I have noted that several companies receiving the "Export company of the year" here in this country (doesn't matter which one) have went bust a couple of years later. I received the "hacker of the year" award at my workplace some years ago. It was supposed to hang with all previous awards in the cafeteria. I did not like that and "forgot" it at home. I quit the company a year later anyway. Edit: Forgot that I worked for the "software product of the year" twice in my life. One needed heavy, painful architectural rework 3 years later. The other was Series 60. People old enough know how that went, killed a global market leader.
Havoc 2y ago
Reminder that they donation dependent
computergert 2y ago
Coincidentally I just got an email from a potential client, Dutch governmental institution, that they don’t want me to use Letsencrypt. They prefer paying for a certificate themselves. Not sure why, apparently they don’t trust it.
stephenr 2y ago
I really wish they would finally branch out and offer S/MIME certificates. Good email clients support them out of the box, it's just a PITA to get them if you don't want to order 100 at a time or something equally ridiculous for SME/individuals.
- account42 2y ago
  Would frequent rotation be reasonable for S/MIME certs though?
  - stephenr 2y ago
    There's nothing specifically that says S/MIME certs would need to have the same 90-day expiration date, but even if they did, I'm making a basic assumption that if there were a standardised, free API to issue S/MIME certs, major email clients would build-in a client to request a certificate - heck it might even prompt major email providers to offer their own solutions for certs, to compete with alternatives that supported using LE certs.
  - Tepix 2y ago
    Once per year or less. Remember to decrypt messages, you need to keep your old certificates/keys around. You can request a new certificate with the same key but i'm not sure that's a good safety practice.
pplonski86 2y ago
Let's encrypt saved me :) I love to use it with certbot in docker-compose :) deploying really can be simple
jaas 2y ago
We consider our ten year anniversary to be in 2025 but I appreciate the kind words here! Today is roughly the ten year anniversary of when we publicly announced our intention to launch Let's Encrypt, but next year is the ten year anniversary of when Let's Encrypt actually issued its first certificate: https://letsencrypt.org/2015/09/14/our-first-cert/ https://letsencrypt.org/2015/09/14/our-first-cert/ In December of 2015 (~9 years ago today) is was made available to everyone, no invitation needed: https://letsencrypt.org/2015/12/03/entering-public-beta/ https://letsencrypt.org/2015/12/03/entering-public-beta/
- nadermx 2y ago
  It's actually serendipitous that it happened exactly on December 2015. That's when I had only enough for a domain, but not for a ssl, and my site needed an ssl. Thanks to let's encrypt free ssl, the project hit.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
_0xdd 2y ago
Such an awesome service (and protocol!)
bigtex 2y ago
Let's Encrypt helped reduce our OUTRAGEOUS Entrust bill(legacy vendor, I didn't pick them, they had insane security protocols for a small company who just needed SSL certs). We had a 4 yr/$14k contract for about 11 certs. Now our SSL is near 0, except for a cert for SSRS that is hard to automate with LE.
xnx 2y ago
Are there any areas today similar to the SSL of 10 years ago that a service like Let's Encrypt could remedy? I see a lot of subscription apps that could pretty easily be replaced by free, non-subscription, ones, but I don't know of anything that widespread.

543 points by gslin 2y ago

pests 2y ago

It feels like just yesterday I was paying for certs, or worst, just running without. Can't believe its been ten years.

ozim 2y ago
Can’t believe there are still anti TLS weirdos.
- dijit 2y ago
  The digital equivalent of a local kebab shop menu does not need encryption. The lack of understanding from us as technologists for people who would have had a working site and are now forced into either: an oligopoly of site hosting companies, or, for their site to break consistently as TLS standards rotate is one thing that brings me shame about our community. You can come up with all kinds of reasons to gatekeep website hosting, “they have to update anyway” even when updating means reinstallion of an OS, “its not that hard to rotate” say people with deep knowledge of computers, “just get someone else to do it” say people who have a financial interest in it being that way. Framing people with legitimate issues as weirdo’s is not as charming as you think it is.
  - pests 2y ago
    You say that until some foreign national gets their kabab order MITM to deliver them some malicious virus that ends up getting him killed.
    - account42 2y ago
      Which is of course a real concern for the average joe.
      - pests 2y ago
        I wish for all my fellow humans to be safe, just because it doesn't protect me personally doesn't mean I think it's not a concern.
  - johannes1234321 2y ago
    TLS doesn't just hide the information transmitted, but also ensures the integrity. Thus nobody on the network tinkered with the prices on the menu. Also the Kebap Shop probably has a form for reservation or ordering, which takes personal information. True, they are all low risk things, but getting TLS is trivial (since many Webservers etc can do letsencrypt rotation fully automatically) and secure defaults are a good thing.
    - dijit 2y ago
      There are plenty of websites that were just static pages used for conveying information. Most people who set them up lacked the ability to turn them into forms that connected to anything. They’ve nearly all been lost to time now though, if a shop has a web-presence it will be through a provider such as “bokabord”, doordash, ubereats (as mentioned), some of whom charge up to 30% of anything booked/ordered via the web. But, I guess no MITM can manipulate prices… except, by charging…
      - burnished 2y ago
        Huh. Never thought about it that way; replacing hypothetical MITM attacks with genuine middlemen.
      - matrss 2y ago
        > There are plenty of websites that were just static pages used for conveying information. If you care about the integrity of the conveyed information you need TLS. If you don't, you wouldn't have published a website in the first place. A while back I've seen a wordpress site for a podcast without https where people also argued it doesn't need it. They had banking information for donations on that site. Sometimes I wish every party involved in transporting packets on the internet would just mangle all unencrypted http that they see, if only to make a point...
        dijit 2y ago
        [flagged]
        2y ago
  - taneliv 2y ago
    I'm always reminded about this by being on the other side of the equation with my car. There is regulation, like mandatory yearly inspections and anyone is only allowed to sell road worthy vehicles. These rules are rather strict, likewise for the driver's license. They aren't impossible to know or understand, but there's a lot of details. However, when I take it to the shop, whether for that yearly inspection, regular maintenance, or because there's something apparently wrong with it, I never know what to expect in terms of time and money. Oh, it needs a new thingamajig? I start to mildly sweat, fearing it to cost six hundred like the flux capacitor that had to be replaced last week/month/year and took two weeks to get shipped from another country. "Ninety cents, and we put it in place for no charge, it literally takes ten seconds", like, I love to hear the news, could have saved me from the anguish by giving a hint when I asked about the price! But need a new key? Starting from three hundred fifty, plus one hundred seventy for a backup copy. Like, where do these prices come from? Actually, don't tell me, I'm a software engineer. I know, I know. I'll just wait until you want your car shop web pages up. Oh, for that you'll need PCI DSS and we can't do that other things because of GDPR. Sorry, my hands are tied here. That'll be four thousand plus tax, mister auto mechanic shop owner.
    - dns_snek 2y ago
      I don't think that's a good analogy, you're comparing a mass produced product to an individualized B2B service that's going to generate profits for your customer.
      - taneliv 2y ago
        It's not an analogy. It's asymmetric warfare.
  - sureIy 2y ago
    Irrelevant. Safe transfer should be the default. Your argument is akin to "I don't have anything to hide." You just do it and don't think about it. Modern servers and services make this completely transparent. The kebab guy doesn't need to worry about this as long as they're not fooled into buying from mala fide hosting companies who tries to upsell you on something that should be the baseline.
    - clan 2y ago
      Nah ah. Not. While we might be able to find common ground in the statement that "safe transfer should be the default", we will differ on the definition of "safe". Unfortunately these discussions often end up in techno-babble. Especially here on HN were we tend to enjoy rather binary viewpoints without too many shades of gray. Try being your own devils advocate: "What if I have something to hide?". Then deal with that. Legitimately. Reasonably. Unless you are an anarkist I assume that we can agree that we need authoraties. A legal framework. Policing. So I 100% support Let's Encrypt and what they have done to destroy the certificate racket. That is a force of good! But I do not think it was a healthy thing that the browsers (and Google search results) "forced" the world defacto to TLS only. Why? Look at the list of Trusted Root Certificates in the big OS and browsers. You are telling me only good guys are listed? None here are or can be influenced by state actors? But that is the good kind of MITM? This then hinges on your definition of "safe transport". Only the anarkist can win against the government. I am not. It might sound like I am in the "I do not have anything to hide" camp. I am not that naive. But I am firmly in the "I prefer more scrutiny when I have something to hide". Because the measures the authorities needs to employ today are too draconian for my liking. I preferred the risk of MITM on an ISP level to what the authoraties need to do now to stay in control. We have not eliminated MITM. Just made it harder. And we forgot to discuss legitimate reasons for MITM because "bad". This is not a "technical" discussion on the fine details of TLS or not. But should be a discussion about the societal changes this causes. We need locks to keep the creeps out but still wants the police to gain access. The current system does not enable that in a healthy way but rather erodes trust. Us binary people can define clear simple technical solutions. But the rest of the world is quite messy. And us bit twiddlers tend to shy away from that and then ignore the push-back to our actions. We cannot have a sober conversation unless we depart from the "encrypt everything" is technically good and then that is set in stone. But here we are: Writing off arguments as irrelevant.
  - gotodengo 2y ago
    Their site will break consistently in any case. Running a site in 2024 comes with a responsibility to update regularly for a good reason. There are more than enough forgotten kebab shop restaurant pages that are now serving malware because they never updated WordPress that an out of date certificate warning is a very good "heads up, this site hasn't been maintained in 6 years" If we're talking hosting even a static HTML file without using a site hosting company, that already requires so much technical knowledge (Domain purchasing, DNS, purchasing a static IP from your ISP, server software which again requires vuln updates) that said person will be able to update a TLS cert without any issue.
    - account42 2y ago
      > There are more than enough forgotten kebab shop restaurant pages that are now serving malware [citation needed] There are plenty of organizations that actively scan the web for "malware" (aka anything that the almighty machine learning algorithms don't like) and are more than happy to harass the website owner and hosting company until their demands are met. Security is ultimately a social issue. Technical means are only one way to improve it and can never solve it 100%. You must never loose sight of the cost imposed by tecnological security solutions versus what improvement they actually offer.
  - serbuvlad 2y ago
    I'm really curious as to what you see as the disadvantages of TLS. Sure, the advantages are minor for some services and critical for other services. However, if you already have bought a domain name, the cost of setting up TLS is basically 0. You just run certbot and give it the domains you want to license. It will set up auto-renew and even edit your Apache/NGINX configs to enable TLS. Sure, TLS standards rotate. But that just means you have to update Apache/NGINX every like 5 years. Hardly a barrier for most people imo.
    - dijit 2y ago
      Its better than it was, but TLS has a lot more knobs to fail than even a basic http server does; theres a whole host of handoff thats happening and running multiple sites is fraught with minor issues. certbot is a python program, better hope it keeps working- it’s definitely not kept working for me and I’m a seasoned sysadmin. a combination of my python environment becoming outdated (making updates impossible) and a deprecation of a critical API needed for it to work. The #1 cause of issues with a hobby website: darkscience.net is that it refuses to negotiate on Chrome because the TLS suites are considered too old, yet in 2020 I was scoring A+ on Qualys SSL report. Its just time, time and effort and its wasted mostly. The letsencrypt tools are really wonderful, just pray they don’t break, and be ready to reinstall everything from scratch at some point.
      - usr1106 2y ago
        > certbot is a python program, better hope it keeps working There is also https://github.com/srvrco/getssl https://github.com/srvrco/getssl which is a bash script. I have lightly audited it years ago and it did not seem to upload your private keys anywhere... I've used it occasionally, but I don't let it run as root, so I need to copy the retrieved certs into the the server config manually.
        dijit 2y ago
        Theres a bunch of alternative clients and I’ve tried many. Larger point is regarding the fact that its required for what amounts to a poster on a wall: yes, someone can come along with a pen an alter the poster- but its not worth the effort to secure for most people and will degrade rapidly with such security too. So, instead they turn to middlemen, or don’t bother. Theres a myriad of other issues, but, its not as easy as we claim.
- wannacboatmovie 2y ago
  Can't believe the HTTPS everywhere cargo cult still can't get it through their skulls there is still a place and use cases for plaintext HTTP. In some cases, CRLs for example, they shall not be served over HTTPS.
- Pannoniae 2y ago
  TLS is not panacea and it's not universally positive. Here are some arguments against it for balance. TLS is fairly computationally intensive - sure, not a big deal now because everyone is using superfast devices but try browsing the internet with a Pentium 4 or something. You won't be able to because there is no AES instruction set support accelerating the keyshake so it's hilariously slow. It also encourages memoryholing old websites which aren't maintained - priceless knowledge is often lost because websites go down because no one is maintaining them. On my hard drive, I have a fair amount of stuff which I'm reasonably confident doesn't exist anywhere on the Internet anymore.... if my drives fail, that knowledge will be lost forever. It is also a very centralised model - if I want to host a website, why do third parties need to issue a certificate for it just so people can connect to it? It also discourages naive experimentation - sure, if you know how, you can MitM your own connection but for the not very technical but curious user, that's probably an insurmountable roadblock.
  - MrGreenTea 2y ago
    Regarding the stuff you safe guard: what are your reasons for not sharing them somehow to prevent that loss when (not if) your drive fails?
    - Pannoniae 2y ago
      I mean, I do! The music I have I put on Soulseek, although the more obscure stuff hasn't been downloaded yet. I also have fairly old video game mods - I don't even know where to share them or if anyone would be interested at all.
      - tomalbrc 2y ago
        The Internet Archive?
      - account42 2y ago
        You could try to upload them to modding sites (preferrably not onces with a longin requirement for downloading) if you don't want to host them yourself. That can be either general modding archives or game-specific community sites - the latter are smaller but more likely to be interested in older mods. Make sure that whatever host you use can be crawled by the internet archive. Interest is probably going to be low but not zero - I often play games long after they have been released and sometimes intentionally using older versions that are no longer supported by current mods.
- account42 2y ago
  In general if you need to resort to ad hominens like calling your detractors weirdos then maybe your position isn't as justified as you want to believe.
- michaelt 2y ago
  I am 99% in favour of widespread use of TLS - but the reality is it means the web only works at the whim of the CA/Browser Forum. And some members of the forum are very eager to flex their authority. If I do everything perfectly, but the CA I used makes some trivial error which, in the case of my certificate, has no real-world security impact? They can send me an e-mail at 6:40 PM telling me they're revoking my certificate at 2:30 PM the next day. Just what you want to find in your inbox when you get in the next day. I hope you weren't into testing, or staged rollouts, or agreeing deployment windows with your users - you'd better YOLO that change into production without any of that. Even though it wasn't your mistake, and there's no suggestion you shouldn't have the certificate you have. As far as the CA/B Forum is concerned, safety-critical systems that can't YOLO changes straight into production with minimal testing and only a few hours of notice don't belong on their PKI infrastructure. You'd better jump to it and fix their mistake right now.
  - account42 2y ago
    I'm probably more critical of TLS in general than you are, but to be fair to LE one of their biggest contributions has been to change certificate updates from a deployment to something that should happen automatically during normal operations. If you have things setup the recommended way your daily certbot/etc run will simply pick up a new certificate and loat it into whatever servers that need it without you having to lift a finger. Of course in practice it doesn't always work out that way.
    - michaelt 2y ago
      A daily certbot run won't protect you if the CA discovers the problem at 2pm (starting the 24 hour revocation timer) but they only have a fix rolled out by 6pm. Anyone whose certbot run was between 2pm and 6pm would get their cert revoked the next day at 2pm anyway - even if it was only issued 18 hours ago. There's also a higher level question: Is this the web we want to be building? One where every site and service has to apply for permission to continue existing every 24 hours? Do we want a web where the barrier to entry for hosting is a round-the-clock ops team, complete with holiday cover? And if you don't have that, you should be using Facebook or Twitter instead?
- dspillett 2y ago
  Or worse: people who still go on and on about how self-signed certificates should be accepted by browsers, and can't be convinced that blind-trust-no-first-use is lousy security. They usually counter with “but SSH uses TOFU” because they don't see, and can't be convinced of, the problem of not verifying the server key signature⁰. I can be fairly sure that I'm talking to the daemon that I've just setup myself without explicitly checking the signature¹, but that particular side-channel assurance doesn't apply to, for example, a client connecting to our SFTP endpoint for the first time² to send us sensitive data. -- [0] Basically, they get away with doing SSH wrong, and want to get away with doing HTTPS wrong the same way. [1] Though I still should, really, and actually do in DayJob. [2] Surprisingly few banks' tech teams bother to verify SSH server signatures on first connection, I know because the ones in our documentation were wrong for a time and no one queried the matter before I noticed it when reviewing that documentation while adding further details. I doubt they'd even notice the signature changing unexpectedly even though that could mean something very serious is going on.
- guappa 2y ago
  My letsencrypt cert, despite all my attempts, works fine with browsers but WILL NOT work with wget/curl/python/whatever. Plus setting up letsencrypt isn't really really easy. Last time it was failing because I had disabled HTTP on port 80 entirely on my server… but letsencrypt uses that to verify that my website has the magic file. So I had to make a script to turn it on for 5 minutes around the time when the certificate gets renewed. -_-' None of this is easy or quick, and people have other stuff to do than to worry about completely hypothetical attacks on their blog.
  - mmsc 2y ago
    >letsencrypt uses that to verify that my website has the magic file. So, instead, use the other authentication methods. For example, DNS.
    - guappa 2y ago
      Is that easier to configure? (no it isn't)
      - mmsc 2y ago
        Setting a single DNS record which doesn't need to be change is more difficult than setting a crontab to open port 80 "around the time you expect the ACME challenge"? How's that?
  - ozim 2y ago
    Not really hypothetical. Google "isp injecting ads", well most of it is from 10 years ago - but that is because now we have TLS everywhere. And it is not attack on your blog but on readers of your blog, well your blog gets the blame of course in case they would be infected by malware or see adult ads.

kome 2y ago

thank you Edward Snowden

vaylian 2y ago
I wanted to post that exact comment.

mrtksn 2y ago

Hands down one of the greatest services out there, stopped a racket and made the internet secure. I remember a time when having an HTTPS connection was for "serious" projects only because the cost of the certificate was much higher than the domain. You go commando and if it sticks then you purchase a certificate for a 100 bucks or something.

dachris 2y ago
There's still enough people out there who don't know better, manually (or auto-renew) purchasing new a certificate every year from their hosting provider like it's 2013.
- yread 2y ago
  Unfortunately, the code signing certificates work pretty much the same way
- mrtksn 2y ago
  AFAIK there's things like Extended Validation Certificate Verification that used to make the browser address bar look more trustworthy by making it green but I don't know if its still a thing. At least in Safari, I don't see a green padlock anywhere.
  - sureIy 2y ago
    Yeah that also stopped being a thing. I'm really happy how Chrome and then other browsers gradually shifted the blame to insecure websites rather than highlighting "secure" ones. You'll still find people online clamoring EV certificates are worth anything more than $0 but you can ignore them just as well.
  - Systemmanic 2y ago
    Chrome and Firefox removed the extra UI stuff for EV certs in 2019: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/security-dev/c/h1bTcoTpfeI https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/security-dev/c/h1... https://groups.google.com/g/firefox-dev/c/6wAg_PpnlY4 https://groups.google.com/g/firefox-dev/c/6wAg_PpnlY4

CarpaDorada 2y ago

A lot of people are not aware that HTTPS certificates do not necessarily guard you from certain types of attacks like DNS injection. You can see <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exy5JwAU8qk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exy5JwAU8qk> for one example where an attack campaign called DNSPionage obtained valid certificates for their attacks. To explain the issue with HTTPS certificates simply, issuance is automated and rests on the security of DNS, which is achieved via DNSSEC and most do not implement.

ta1243 2y ago
Technically it's an attack against the certificate issuing authority, bypassing their authorisation checks (is this person really authorised to issue a certificate for the domain). Trouble is even CAA entries won't help here (if you're spoofing A records, you can spoof CAA records too). DNSSEC might help against this, I don't know enough about DNS though. Another type of attack is an IP hijack, which allows you to pass things like http authentication (the normal ACME method), but won't bypass CAA records. Can't use letsencrypt to issue a cert - even if you own the IP address my A or AAAA records point to - if my CAA doesn't have letsenctypt as an approved issuer.
- CarpaDorada 2y ago
  With DNSSEC you can be certain that the response you got was issued by the nameserver that is claimed (well, by someone who owns the private key). The domain owner, and registrar can both be at fault, the CA is the last entity to blame because they are performing an automated check of domain ownership. For maximum security you'd want to buy your own TLD as my YT video talks about, to circumvent any other registries, registry wholesalers, and registrars' security models, but an adequate protection for most is to use registry/registrar lock and implement DNSSEC correctly. IP hijack will then not work when all of the above is done correctly. Another option is manual certificate issuance with a CA whose security model is better than yours, but not implementing DNSSEC leaves you open to other attacks.
  - tptacek 2y ago

wannacboatmovie 2y ago

Nothing makes me trust a site with my payment info more than seeing a LE or domain-validated certificate with no ownership details in the DN.

aaomidi 2y ago
The rate of misissuance of EV and OV is much higher than DV.
- wannacboatmovie 2y ago
  Source? I'm not questioning it, I'd like to know more. DV always seemed vulnerable to DNS tampering.
  - ta1243 2y ago
    And EV is vulnerable to a fancy looking fax (remember them?) Do you really check your site has an EV every single time? Especially now browsers treat them the same? If not, how do you know someone hasn't got a DV certificate for this specific visit? Scott Helme has a thorough takedown of them, and that was 7 years ago when they were still a thing. https://scotthelme.co.uk/are-ev-certificates-worth-the-paper-theyre-written-on/ https://scotthelme.co.uk/are-ev-certificates-worth-the-paper...
  - aaomidi 2y ago
    I’m active in the WebPKI community (you might want to check out my Substack: https://webpki.substack.com/ https://webpki.substack.com/) EV and OV when it includes dns names still requires domain control validation anyway. EV certs are generally manually verified. This means there’s a human factor in the middle of this process. DV certs can, and should, be fully automated. Multi perspective validation is about to be required too: https://cabforum.org/2024/11/07/ballot-smc010-introduction-of-multi-perspective-issuance-corroboration/ https://cabforum.org/2024/11/07/ballot-smc010-introduction-o...
sunaookami 2y ago
HTTPS does not validate the trustworthiness of a site. Never has and never will. It only validates that the site has not been tampered with during transfer. Phishing sites can also have HTTPS, that doesn't make them trustworthy.

aurareturn 2y ago

People talk about paying for certificates but one major pain point solved by PaaS companies over the last 5 years is automatically adding certificates and renewing them for your app deployments. It saves a huge amount of headache. In 2024, if your PaaS does not have automated encryption for deploys, I will never use it.

selectnull 2y ago

What I'm most thankful is the ACME protocol. Does anyone remember how we renewed certificates before LE? Yeah, private keys were being sent via email as zip attachments. That was a security charade. And as far as I know, it was a norm among CAs (I remember working with several). Thank you Let's Encrypt.

ta1243 2y ago
Just handholding a renewal with globalsign I generate the new key on the server as part of the csr creation process. I run it on the server itself so the key never leaves the server's internal storage. CSR gets sent off to globalsign (via a third party because #largeCompany), then a couple of days later I get the certificate back and apply to the server Would love to use ACME instead, and store the key in memory (ramdrive etc), but these are the downsides of working for a company less agile than an oil-tanker
chrismorgan 2y ago
What of Certificate Signing Requests? The whole purpose was that you wouldn’t send private keys around. (I was only slightly involved with a couple of TLS certificates before then, and certainly they enforced the CSR approach, but maybe such terrible practice was more common in the real world that I knew.)
- selectnull 2y ago
  My memory of the whole process is kinda fuzzy, you're probably right about CSRs. Hopefully the private keys were not sent around via unencrypted email. But the point still stands: the whole process was a nightmare, no automation, error prone, renewal easily forgetable... The large companies could have had a staff to manage all that. I was just a solo developer managing my own projects, and it was a hassle.
tialaramex 2y ago
> Yeah, private keys were being sent via email as zip attachments. Internally, perhaps. And also on a small scale maybe with CA "resellers" who were often shady outfits which were in it for a quick buck and didn't much care about the rules. But as a formal issuance mechanism I very much doubt it. The public CAs are prohibited from knowing the private key for a certificate they issue. Indeed there's a fun incident some years back where a reseller (who have been squirrelling away such private keys) just sends them all to the issuing CA, apparently thinking this is some sort of trump card - and so the issuing CA just... revokes all those certificates immediately because they're prohibited from knowing these private keys. The correct thing to do, and indeed the thing ACME is doing, although not the interesting part of the protocol, is to produce a Certificate Signing Request. This data structure goes roughly as follows: Dear Certificate Authority, I am Some Internet Name [and maybe more than one], and here is some other facts you may be entitled to certify about me. You will observe that this document is signed, proving I know a Private Key P. Please issue me a certificate, with my name and other details, showing that you associate those details with this key P which you don't know. Signed, P. This actually means (with ACME or without) that you can successfully air gap the certificate issuance process, with the machine that knows the private key actually never talking to a Certificate Authority at all and the private key never leaving that machine. That's not how most people do it because they aren't paranoid, but it's been eminently possible for decades.

KronisLV 2y ago

Here’s to 10 more years! With web servers like Caddy, software like certbot and even something like Apache2 getting mod_md, I’d say we’re in a pretty good spot! That said, I’m wondering why there aren’t 10 or so popular alternatives to LE, since that seems to be the landscape for domain registrars, for example.

gloosx 2y ago

I really wish something like this comes up for the desktop certification world as well. Microsoft just went full insane mode with their current requirements, and their certificate plugs are making more money than ever without lifting a finger. So funny that all of their security, vetting and endless verifications are standing on a single passport photo sent over an email to this day.

lakomen 2y ago

Time flies when you're having fun. Congratulations

account42 2y ago

I'm kinda mixed on LE. It's nice that you can now get free TLS certs without having to resort to shady outfits like StartSSL. This allows any website to easily move to HTTPS, which has basically elimated sensitive data (including logins) from being sent over unencrypted connections. On the otherhand, this reinforces the inherently proken trust model of TLS certificates where any certificate authority (and a lot of them are controlled by outright hostile entities) has the ability to issue certificates for your domain without your involvement. Yes there are tons of kludges to try and mitigate this design flaw (CAA records, certificate transparency) but they don't 100% solve the issue. If not for LE perhaps there would have been more motivation to implement support for a saner trust mechanism by now that limmits certificate issuance to those entities who actually have any authority to decide over domain ownership, like with DNSSEC+DANE. I'm also concerned with the (intentional) lack of backwards compatibility with moving sites to TLS, which is not just a one time TLS on/off issue but a continual deprecation of protocols and ciphers. This is warranted for things that need to be secure like banking or email but shouldn't really be needed to view a recipe or other similar static and non-critical information. Concerns about network operators inserting ads or other shit are better solved with regulation.

rocqua 2y ago
> If not for LE perhaps there would have been more motivation to implement support for a saner trust mechanism by now I would argue that LE has only highlighted these problems, and now actually causes people with power to worry about them. There is a chance we would have gotten something better than TLS if the lack of LE kept certificates a pain. But that seems unlikely to me. Because the fundamental problem remains hard.

INTPenis 2y ago

Config management took me many years to adopt, containers took me about 6 years to warm up to. But LE was something I jumped on immediately. I had worked in web hosting for 10 years already when it came out so I remember faxing your driver's license in order to validate a TLS cert. It just felt like such a scam for so long that these CAs were over charging for something that is just a key signing. But I guess automation and standards had to catch up in order for LE to securely setup their CA.

lambdaone 2y ago

Let's Encrypt is a massive achievement, and is now essential infrastructure. Basing it on an open protocol, so it doesn't become a single point of failure, was a clever idea that allows the idea to survive the demise of any single organization. May there be many more such anniversaries.

brchr 2y ago

Peter Eckersley (1978-2022) was posthumously inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame for his founding work on Let’s Encrypt. The Internet is a better place because of Peter (and his many collaborators and colleagues).

usr1106 2y ago
https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/ https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/ None of them I have ever heard of. Whatever that may mean. Edit: On the whole list https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/all/ https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/all/ I spotted maybe seven names. Still a single digit percentage.
- brchr 2y ago
  Vint Cerf & Bob Kahn (TCP/IP), Paul Baran (packet switching), Tim Berners-Lee (WWW), Marc Andreesen (Netscape), Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive), Douglas Engelbart (hypertext), Aaron Swartz (RSS, Creative Commons), Richard Stallman (GNU, free software movement), Van Jacobson (TCP/IP congestion control), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Mitchell Baker (Mozilla), Linus Torvalds (Linux)... ...but you’re missing the point of my comment, which is simply to acknowledge and honor (my late dear friend) Peter.
  - usr1106 2y ago
    Ah, I missed Linus Torvalds and you might have missed Bob Metcalfe (Ethernet) and Jon Postel (RFC work). My point was not do criticize the achievements of the work of any of those people. 1. I was not actively aware that this hall exists 2. I am mostly critical to such awards in general. I have noted that several companies receiving the "Export company of the year" here in this country (doesn't matter which one) have went bust a couple of years later. I received the "hacker of the year" award at my workplace some years ago. It was supposed to hang with all previous awards in the cafeteria. I did not like that and "forgot" it at home. I quit the company a year later anyway. Edit: Forgot that I worked for the "software product of the year" twice in my life. One needed heavy, painful architectural rework 3 years later. The other was Series 60. People old enough know how that went, killed a global market leader.

Havoc 2y ago

Reminder that they donation dependent

computergert 2y ago

Coincidentally I just got an email from a potential client, Dutch governmental institution, that they don’t want me to use Letsencrypt. They prefer paying for a certificate themselves. Not sure why, apparently they don’t trust it.

stephenr 2y ago

I really wish they would finally branch out and offer S/MIME certificates. Good email clients support them out of the box, it's just a PITA to get them if you don't want to order 100 at a time or something equally ridiculous for SME/individuals.

account42 2y ago
Would frequent rotation be reasonable for S/MIME certs though?
- stephenr 2y ago
  There's nothing specifically that says S/MIME certs would need to have the same 90-day expiration date, but even if they did, I'm making a basic assumption that if there were a standardised, free API to issue S/MIME certs, major email clients would build-in a client to request a certificate - heck it might even prompt major email providers to offer their own solutions for certs, to compete with alternatives that supported using LE certs.
- Tepix 2y ago
  Once per year or less. Remember to decrypt messages, you need to keep your old certificates/keys around. You can request a new certificate with the same key but i'm not sure that's a good safety practice.

pplonski86 2y ago

Let's encrypt saved me :) I love to use it with certbot in docker-compose :) deploying really can be simple

jaas 2y ago

We consider our ten year anniversary to be in 2025 but I appreciate the kind words here! Today is roughly the ten year anniversary of when we publicly announced our intention to launch Let's Encrypt, but next year is the ten year anniversary of when Let's Encrypt actually issued its first certificate: https://letsencrypt.org/2015/09/14/our-first-cert/ https://letsencrypt.org/2015/09/14/our-first-cert/ In December of 2015 (~9 years ago today) is was made available to everyone, no invitation needed: https://letsencrypt.org/2015/12/03/entering-public-beta/ https://letsencrypt.org/2015/12/03/entering-public-beta/

nadermx 2y ago
It's actually serendipitous that it happened exactly on December 2015. That's when I had only enough for a domain, but not for a ssl, and my site needed an ssl. Thanks to let's encrypt free ssl, the project hit.

deleted 2y ago

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_0xdd 2y ago

Such an awesome service (and protocol!)

bigtex 2y ago

Let's Encrypt helped reduce our OUTRAGEOUS Entrust bill(legacy vendor, I didn't pick them, they had insane security protocols for a small company who just needed SSL certs). We had a 4 yr/$14k contract for about 11 certs. Now our SSL is near 0, except for a cert for SSRS that is hard to automate with LE.

xnx 2y ago

Are there any areas today similar to the SSL of 10 years ago that a service like Let's Encrypt could remedy? I see a lot of subscription apps that could pretty easily be replaced by free, non-subscription, ones, but I don't know of anything that widespread.