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Upcoming Changes to Let's Encrypt Certificates
- Animats 10mo agoThese short certificate lifetimes make Let's Encrypt a central point of failure for much of the Internet. That's a concern. Failure may be technical or political, too.
- Sesse__ 10mo agoThere are other free ACME-based providers, so switching should be fairly painless if needed. (I guess if you've issued CAA records or similar, you may need some manual intervention.)
- Animats 10mo agoYou can have more than one CAA record, so it should be possible to configure backup certificate authorities. It's probably a good idea to do that for important sites.
- gethly 10mo agoName one, baseide the NSA run Cloudflare.
- madeofpalk 10mo agoACME https://guide.actalis.com/ssl/activation/acme https://guide.actalis.com/ssl/activation/acme Google https://pki.goog/ https://pki.goog/ SSL.com https://www.ssl.com/blogs/sslcom-supports-acme-protocol-ssl-tls-certificate-automation/ https://www.ssl.com/blogs/sslcom-supports-acme-protocol-ssl-... ZeroSSL https://zerossl.com/documentation/acme/ https://zerossl.com/documentation/acme/ I don't actually think Cloudflare runs an ACME Certificate Authority. They just partner with LetsEncrypt? Edit: Looks like they don't run any CA, they just delegate out to a bunch of others https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/reference/certificate-authorities/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/reference/certificate-...
- bigbuppo 10mo agoDoesn't matter. This is a push by the CA/Browser Forum. Google, Mozilla, and all the CAs got together and said, "hey, what if we just made certificates shorter because we're too stupid to figure out a revocation mechanism that actually works other than expiration." They've tried this shit before, but saner heads prevailed. This time they did not.
- tptacek 10mo agoShorter lifetimes strongly push customers towards ACME and thus away from commercial CAs, so it's odd to suggest that CAs subverted this process.
- ekr____ 10mo agoMozilla does have a revocation mechanism that actually works. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2025/08/crlite-fast-private-and-comprehensive-certificate-revocation-checking-in-firefox/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2025/08/crlite-fast-private-and-co...
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Havoc 10mo ago>Let's Encrypt a central point of failure That's been true for a while, regardless of cert length. Everyone leans on them and unlike CF and other choke points of the internet...Let's Encrypt is a non-profit
- loloquwowndueo 10mo agoYou say it like it’s a bad thing. Do you donate to them? I do !
- Havoc 10mo ago>Do you donate to them? yes
- lysace 10mo agoAgreed. We need a second source, preferably located in the EU. They could share operational code/protocols/etc. I.e. during peace time they could collaborate. The EU started building the Galileo GNSS ("GPS") in 2008 as a backup in case the US turned hostile. And now look where we are in 2025 with the US president openly talking about taking Greenland. Wise move. It seemed like a gigantic waste back then. It was really, really expensive. Then lots of European countries ordered F35s from Lockheed Martin. What an own goal. This includes Denmark/Greenland. But i digress...
- darkwater 10mo agoActalis is European, Italian to be more precise, owned by Aruba (if that last thing is good or not can be probably discussed, though).
- Cu3PO42 10mo agoZeroSSL is Austrian, however since I last looked at them it appears they were acquired by a US corporation.
- alwillis 10mo ago> We need a second source, preferably located in the EU. Absolutely. It feels like a matter of time before the current US administration will attempt to implement some authoritarian policy regarding certificates.
- ocdtrekkie 10mo agoI am at the point of looking forward to it. The CA/B is so unhinged and so unaccountable and the appetite to fix it is so small, a broad scale collapse of the Internet caused by the CA/B's incompetence is looking like the only way to finally end their regime.
- Starlevel004 10mo agoHere's the key takeaways as to why that's an issue
- woodruffw 10mo agoCan you explain how shorter certificate lifetimes make LE more of a single point of failure? I can squint and see an argument for CA diversity; I struggle to see how reducing certificate lifetimes increases CA centralization.
- sethhochberg 10mo agoShorter lifetimes means more renewal events, which means more individual occasions in which LE (or whatever other cert authority) simply must be available before sites start falling off the internet for lack of ability to renew in time. We're not quite there yet, but the logical progression of shorter and shorter certificate lifetimes to obviate the problems related to revocation lists would suggest that we eventually end up in a place where the major ACME CAs join the list of heavily-centralized companies which are dependencies of "the internet", alongside AWS, Cloudflare, and friends. With cert lifetimes measured in years or months, the CA can have a bad day and as long as you didn't wait until the last possible minute to renew, you're unimpacted. With cert lifetimes trending towards days or less, now your CA really does need institutionally important levels of high availability. Its less that LE becomes more of a single point of failure than it is that the concept of ACME CAs in general join the list of critically available things required to keep a site online.
- woodruffw 10mo ago> would suggest that we eventually end up in a place where the major ACME CAs join the list of heavily-centralized companies which are dependencies of "the internet" I think that particular ship sailed a decade ago! > Its less that LE becomes more of a single point of failure than it is that the concept of ACME CAs in general join the list of critically available things required to keep a site online. Okay, this is what I wanted clarified. I don't disagree that CAs are critical infrastructure, and that there's latent risk whenever infrastructure becomes critical. I just think that risk is justified, and that LE in particular is no more or less of a SPOF with these policy changes.
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoif you renew 7 days before cert ends, it would need to be down for entire week in worst case so it' far less bad in general. Hell, you can still set it to renew when cert still have month left. I'm more worried that the clowns at the helm will push into something stupid like week or 3 days, "coz it improves security in some theoretical case"
- JackSlateur 10mo agoNo There are other CA with ACME support Including paying CA, if you really want to pay : sectigo
- bigbuppo 10mo agoSectigo is also going to be forced into issuing short-lived certificates. This is a CA/Browser Forum decision that is binding on all member CAs.
- Dylan16807 10mo agoThey will, but Sectigo forcing faster renewal doesn't make Let's Encrypt into a central failure point. Central failure point was the worry above.
- JackSlateur 10mo agoBut sectigo does not care, they are just like Let's Encrypt (except you pay) You can renew your sectigo certificates with ACME so from a technical point of view, just trigger your cron more often
- LunaSea 10mo agoAWS still generates yearly certs.
- JackSlateur 10mo agoIn april 2026, they will generate certificates with a 200 days validity period
- stusmall 10mo agoI'm seeing this hot take a lot but it doesn't make sense. Are people worried than LE is going to have a 45 day outage or something? ACME is an open standard with other implementations so I'm having trouble seeing the political central point of failure too. It's okay for something to be a good thing and to celebrate it. We don't have to frown about everything.
- patmorgan23 10mo agoYeah, doesn't the ACME bot defaults have it trying to renew the cert when it has like 30% of its life time left? Which means the CA would have to be down for Days/Weeks fo it to impact production. Oh and you would definitely know about this outage because you would hear about it in your news, and the monitoring you already have set up to yell at you when you cert is about to retire (you already have that right? Right?). And you can STILL trivially switch to another CA that supports ACME.
- SchemaLoad 10mo agoFor this to be a problem LE would have to be broken for an entire month. And even then you'd have ample time to move to something else.
- tecleandor 10mo agoThis is not a Let's Encrypt policy. This is a global policy: https://www.digicert.com/blog/tls-certificate-lifetimes-will-officially-reduce-to-47-days https://www.digicert.com/blog/tls-certificate-lifetimes-will...
- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoRelated: Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46117126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46117126
- btown 10mo agoThe certificate lifetime decrease, to 45 days, was discussed in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46117126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46117126 This isn't LE's decision: a 47 day max was voted on by the CA/Browser Forum. https://www.digicert.com/blog/tls-certificate-lifetimes-will-officially-reduce-to-47-days https://www.digicert.com/blog/tls-certificate-lifetimes-will... https://cabforum.org/2025/04/11/ballot-sc081v3-introduce-schedule-of-reducing-validity-and-data-reuse-periods/ https://cabforum.org/2025/04/11/ballot-sc081v3-introduce-sch... https://groups.google.com/a/groups.cabforum.org/g/servercert-wg/c/bvWh5RN6tYI?pli=1 https://groups.google.com/a/groups.cabforum.org/g/servercert... - public votes of all members, which were unanimously Yes or Abstain. IMO this is a policy change that can Break the Internet, as many archived/legacy sites on old-school certificates may not be able to afford the upfront tech or ongoing labor to transition from annual to effectively-monthly renewals, and will simply be shut down. And, per other comments, this will make LE the only viable option to modernize, and thus much more of a central point of failure than before. But Let's Encrypt is not responsible for this move, and did not vote on the ballot.
- jsheard 10mo ago> And, per other comments, this will make LE the only viable option to modernize, and thus much more of a central point of failure than before. Let's Encrypt isn't the only free ACME provider, you can take your pick from them, ZeroSSL, SSL.com, Google and Actalis, or several of them for redundancy. If you use Caddy that's even the default behavior - it tries ZeroSSL first and automatically falls back to Let's Encrypt if that fails for whatever reason.
- autotune 10mo agoLE has some gnarly rate limiting rules, so I use ZeroSSL. Works out great for my purposes.
- OptionOfT 10mo agoThat's the reason I switched. I had an issue where a path was not mounted correctly and we blew through our limits. Oh, on LE the Rate Limit Adjustment Request forms the contractual things (if that's what they are?) do not load: https://isrg.formstack.com/forms/rate_limit_adjustment_request https://isrg.formstack.com/forms/rate_limit_adjustment_reque...
- gruez 10mo ago>If you’re requesting certificates from our tlsserver or shortlived profiles, you’ll begin to see certificates which come from the Generation Y hierarchy this week. This switch will also mark the opt-in general availability of short-lived certificates from Let’s Encrypt, including support for IP Addresses on certificates. Does that mean IP certificates will be generally available some time this week?
- infogulch 10mo agoNow all servers can participate in Encrypted Client Hello for enhanced user privacy: if clients open TLS connections with ECH where the server IP is used in the ClientHelloOuter and the target SNI domain is in the encrypted ClientHelloInner, then eavesdroppers won't be able to read which domain the user is connecting to. This vision still needs a several more developments to land before it actually results in an increment in user privacy, but they are possible: 1. User agents can somehow know they can connect to a host with IP SNI and ECH (a DNS record?) 2. User agents are modified to actually do this 3. User agents use encrypted DNS to look up the domain 4. Server does not combine its IP cert with it's other domain certs (SAN)
- noirscape 10mo agoInsane that they're dropping client certificates for authentication. Reading the linked post, it's because Google wants them to be separate PKIs and forced the change in their root program. They aren't used much, but they are a neat solution. Google forcing this change just means there's even more overhead when updating certs in a larger project.
- ggm 10mo agoThe certification serves different purposes. It might feel like a symmetric arrangement but it isn't. On the whole i think implementing this split is sensible. I might add I've changed my mind a bit on this.
- cyberax 10mo agoIt's a good change. I've seen at least one company that had misconfigured mTLS to accept any client certificate signed by a trusted CA, rather than just by the internal corporate CA.
- LtWorf 10mo agoShould we remove anything that was at some point misconfigured somewhere?
- zzo38computer 10mo agoI (partially) agree that it is a good change, but for a different reason. For security purposes, the certificates should include only the permissions that are required (although maybe they ought to allow you to have certificates that include both if you have a use for it (which as I have mentioned, you usually should not need because you will probably want to use different certificates instead), but unfortunately they do not allow that).
- losvedir 10mo agoThe decrease in lifetimes has had a fair bit of discussion, but I haven't seen a lot of discussion about the mTLS changes. Is anyone else running into issues there? We'll be hit by it, as we use mTLS as one of several methods for our customers to authenticate the webhooks we deliver them, but haven't determined what we'll be doing yet.
- llama052 10mo agoWe use locally generated certs for Mtls with different lifetimes. Relying on public CAs for chains of trust like that makes me nervous, especially if something gets revoked.
- arccy 10mo agoit'd be funny if someone decided that DANE would be a good way to distribute your own roots...
- jeroenhd 10mo agoThe certificate offered from server to client and the certificate the server expects from the client do not need to share a CA. This only affects you if you have a server set up to verify mTLS clients against the Let's Encrypt root certificate(s), or maybe every trusted CA on the system. You might do that if you're using the host HTTPS certificates handed out by certbot or other CAs as mTLS client certificates. You can still generate your own mTLS key pairs and use them to authenticate over a connection whose hostname is verified with Let's Encrypt, which is what most people will be doing.
- losvedir 10mo ago> The certificate offered from server to client and the certificate the server expects from the client do not need to share a CA. Sure, but it seems like all the CAs are stopping issuing certificates with the client EKU. At least LetsEncrypt and DigiCert, since by the Google requirement they can't do that and normal certs, and I guess there's not enough market to have one just for that. > You might do that if you're using the host HTTPS certificates handed out by certbot or other CAs as mTLS client certificate Sure, what's wrong with that? > You can still generate your own mTLS key pairs and use them to authenticate over a connection whose hostname is verified with Let's Encrypt, which is what most people will be doing. That lets the client verify the host, but the server doesn't know where the connection is coming from. Generating mTLS pairs means pinning and coordinated rotation and all that. Currently servers can simply keep an up to date CA store (which is common and easy), and check the subject name, freeing the client to easily rotate their cert.
- wrs 10mo agoJust curious… I’ve seen this X1/X2 convention before for CA roots. Does anyone know the origin or rationale for this? Now we have a “Y” generation showing up, but it seems like whoever thought of “X” didn’t anticipate more than three generations, or they would have used A1/A2.
- phasmantistes 10mo agoIt's a good question! I know that our first root (ISRG Root X1) used that naming scheme simply because it was cross-signed by IdenTrust's root (DST Root CA X3) which used that same scheme. But where they got the scheme from, I don't know. Using Y to denote the "next generation" of roots is a scheme I came up with in the past year while planning our YE/YR ceremony, so it's certainly not something that people were thinking about when they named the first roots.
- kmeisthax 10mo agoLet's Encrypt, you're not even a for-profit business; there's nobody you need to shield the blow from. Just say "we're reducing certificate lifetimes to comply with CA/Browser Forum rules". You don't need to do the cowardly "replace lower with change" in the headline thing.
- victorbjorklund 10mo agoThat does not make any sense. Plenty of things on the internet are Open Source / Non-profit yet it affects us a lot. Of course it’s good to give people relying on your stuff heads-up etc.
- wizzwizz4 10mo agoGP is criticising the use of language in the headline, not the fact there's an announcement.
- b112 10mo agoPlus, the announcer is standing in front of a hedge. I'm not sure why, but every corporate picture I've seen of someone, in this context, is standing in front of a hedge. Seems to be a California thing? (Where I live, we only have leaves on hedges 6 months of the year)
- tptacek 10mo agoThe announcer, Matthew McPherrin, is a frequent commenter here (and a stand-up person deeply involved with information security).
- asadotzler 10mo agoIt's "let's not take your picture inside of the office because everyone hates the inside of offices. let's take your picture outside instead, near the office, but not featuring the office. oh, that tree over there is nice, but darn, the lighting underneath its branches isn't great. hey, that hedge over there reads great in light test and it works with what you're wearing, so, yeah, that'll do just fine."
- ottah 10mo agoI'm kind of had enough of unnecessary policy ratcheting, it's a problem in a every industry where a solution is not possible or practical; so the knob that can be tweaked is always turned. Same issue with corporate compliance, I'm still rotating password, with 2fa, sometimes three or four factors for an environment, and no one can really justify it, except the fear that not doing more will create liability.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 10mo agoThis was stated as a long-term goal long ago. The idea is that you should automate away certificate issuance and stop caring, and to eventually get lifetimes short enough that revocation is not necessary, because that's easier than trying to fix how broken revocation is.
- ryandrake 10mo agoThe problem is when the automation fails, you're back to manual. And decreasing the period between updates means more chances for failure. I've been flamed by HN for admitting this, but I've never gotten automated L.E. certificate renewal to work reliably. Something always fails. Fortunately I just host a handful of hobby and club domains and personal E-mail, and don't rely on my domains for income. Now, I know it's been 90 days because one of my web sites fails or E-mail starts to complain about the certificate being bad, and I have to ssh into my VPS to muck around. This news seems to indicate that I get to babysit certbot even more frequently in the future.
- LtWorf 10mo agoI did manage to set it up and it has been working ok but it has been a PITA. Also for some reason they contact my server over HTTP, so I must open port 80 just to do the renovation.
- patmorgan23 10mo agoThat would be because you set up the HTTP-01 challenge as your domain verification method. https://letsencrypt.org/docs/challenge-types/ https://letsencrypt.org/docs/challenge-types/
- gethly 10mo agoWhat is the point of shortening the life time to 45 days? Why not 60 seconds? That's way more secure. Everything is automated after all, so why risk compromised certificate for such a long period, like 45 days? Or how about we issue a new certificate per request? That should remove most of the risks.
- shim__ 10mo agoCould have just kept using OSCP stapling
- ekr____ 10mo agoBasically OCSP stapling (more specifically must-staple) is isomorphic to short-lived certificates.
- alwillis 10mo agoOSCP enables every website someone visits to be tracked; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46290033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46290033
- SkiFire13 10mo agoOSCP stapling (which OP mentions) is supposed to fix that though.
- jfindper 10mo agoWhile I believe you're posting questions out of frustration rather than genuine curiosity, I think it's worth pointing out two things. One: most of the reasoning is available for reading. Lots of discussion was had. If you're actually curious, I would suggest starting with the CA/B mailing group. Some conversation is in the MDSP (Mozilla's dev-security-policy) archives as well. Two: it's good to remember that the competing interests in almost every security-related conversation is the balance between security and usability. Obviously, a 60-second lifetime is unusable. The goal is to get the overlap between secure and usable to be as big as possible.
- jcims 10mo agoI used to be knee deep in PKI stuff, now I hardly pay attention. Two quick questions: 1 - Are there any TLS libraries that enable warnings when certs are nearing expiration? 2 - Are there any extensions in the works (or previous failed attempts) for TLS to have the client validate the next planned certificate and signal both ends when that fails?
- ekr____ 10mo agoTo the best of my knowledge the answer to "2" is no.
- jcims 10mo agoI did a bunch of work with Verisign as a contractor back in the early 2000s and got to see some of the systems and infrastructure issuing a good portion of the world's certificates at that time. 15 years later I was at Google when they let an intermediate certificate in their SMTP certs expire and had a major GMail outage. At work last week we had a major outage related to certificate issues. Of course there are thousands upon thousands of stories like that in between. The chains of trust you can build with PKI have been incredibly useful and instrumental to securing code, data and traffic, but the fact that it's still subject to such brittle failure modes is bemusing.
- simonsarris 10mo agoafter some failures with Let's Encrypt (almost certainly my fault wrt auto renewal) I switched to free 15 year Cloudflare certs instead and I'm very happy not worrying about it any more.
- SchemaLoad 10mo agoI wouldn't be surprised if eventually clients just start rejecting certificates that are too long. Imagine if someone bought a domain, but a previous owner is holding a certificate for it that lasts 15 years. At least under the new scheme if you let the domain sit for 45 days you'll know only you hold valid certificates for it.
- notherhack 10mo agoThat was a smart move but those days are over. Your existing 15 year certs will continue to be accepted until they expire but then you'll have to get a new cert and be in the same 45-day-churn boat the rest of us are.
- NoahZuniga 10mo agoThe cloudflare 15 year cert is one they issue privately and that they only use to authenticate your origin. Cloudflare manages the certificates for connections coming from the web.
- notepad0x90 10mo agoI know this is a good thing, but I've struggled a lot on systems that don't have good/reliable NTP time updates. Also, at some point in the lifetime graph, you start getting diminishing returns. There aren't many scenarios where you get your private keys stolen, but the bad guys couldn't maintain access for more than a couple of weeks. In my humble opinion, if this is the direction the CA/B and other self-appointed leaders want to go, it is time to rethink the way PKI works. We should maybe stop thinking of LetsEncrypt as a CA but it (and similar services) can function as more of a real-time trust facilitators? If all they're checking for is server control, then maybe a near-real-time protocol to validate that, issue a cert, and have the webserver use that immediately is ideal? Lots of things need to change for this to work of course, but it is practical. Not so long ago, very short DNS TTL's were met with similar apprehension. Perhaps the "cert expiry" should be tied to the DNS TTL. With the server renewing much more frequently (e.g.: If the TTL is 1 hour, the server will renew every 15 minutes). Point being, the current system of doing things might not be the best place to experiment with low expiry lifetimes, but new ways of doing things that can make this work could be engineered.
- tptacek 10mo agoWhy do you need precise timing to make this work?
- notepad0x90 10mo agoNot precise, but for example if it's been over a day since the last time update, i start getting errors on various sites, including virtually every site behind cloudflare. (assuming you're referring to the initial issue I mentioned). One of the setups that gives me issues is machines that are resumed from a historical snapshot and start doing things immediately, if the NTP date hasn't been updated since the last snapshot you start getting issues (despite snapshots being updated after every daily run). Most sites won't break (especially with a 24h window, although longer always have issues), but enough sites change their certs so frequently now, it's a constant issue. Even with a 10 year cert, if you access at the right time you'll have issues, the difference now is it isn't a once in a 10 year event, but once in every few days some times. Perhaps if TLS clients requesting a time update to the OS was a standardized thing and if NTP client daemons supported that method it would be a lot less painful?
- notherhack 10mo agoThe other CAs with a free tier that I'm aware of (zerossl, ssl.com, actalis, google trust, cloudflare) require you to have an account (which means you're at their mercy), and most of them limit the number of free certs you can get to a very small number and don't offer free wildcard certs at all. There really is no alternative to LE.
- cheeze 10mo agoAWS Certificate Manager manages this all for you via DNS validation. Granted, you're locked into their ecosystem, can't export PK, etc. so it's FAR from a perfect solution here but I've actually been pretty impressed with the product from a "I need to run my personal website and don't want to have to care about certificates" perspective. Granted, you're paying for the cert, just not directly. I agree with your statement completely though.
- eterm 10mo agoHow much does that end up costing? I'm interested to know for my own personal domain.
- zaik 10mo ago> which means you're at their mercy Let's Encrypt could easily refuse to issue a certificate for a certain domain, even if you don't have a registered account. I don't see much difference.
- _jzlw 10mo ago[flagged]
- h43z 10mo agoDid I understand that correctly that I will be able to get a certificate for an IP?
- phasmantistes 10mo agoYep! Should be available to the general public (as long as you're using an ACME client that can be configured to request a specific profile) later this week.
- parhamn 10mo agoGiven certificate issuance basically ended up being "do you control the DNS for this domain", I feel like all of it could've been so much simpler if it was designed like that from day one. While I love Let's Encrypt it feels so silly to use a third party to verify I can generate a Cloudflare API key (even .well-known is effectively "can you run a webserver on said dns entry"). Edit: TIL about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Named_Entities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Na...
- lousken 10mo agoI am not sure how I feel about this solution. It is already painful to deal with certs on every single piece of IT equipment. Unless you create and manage your own CA and manage it, which is an extra burden, what is the point of this? This will only create more janky scripts and annoyances for very little benefit. What's next? Enforcing email signing with SMIME or PGP?
- jacquesm 10mo agoI'm halfway tempted to go back to HTTP. You don't do breaking changes like this without giving your 'customers' a chance to stick to their ways. I have more than enough on my plate already and don't need the likes of letsencrypt to give me more work.
- londons_explore 10mo agoI miss the days when I could set up some random Apache server and leave it running with zero attention for a decade or two. These days it seems like even the tiniest of projects have random sysadmin work like a compulsory change to https certs with little notice. It's frustrating and I think has contributed to the death of the noncommercial corners of the internet.
- gonzo41 10mo agoI agree, however the simplest place for a static bit of the web seems to be an s3 bucket with cloudfront or something similar.
- londons_explore 10mo agoPlease accept the new T&C's within 90 days or your account will be terminated... 2 factor Auth now compulsory. Please validate your identity with our third party identity provider so we can confirm you are not on the sanctions list. If you do not, your account will be blocked. Etc etc. Every third party service requires at least a little work and brainspace.
- jmb99 10mo agoI just checked, and one of my web servers has an uptime of 845 days, last login May 2 of last year. Based on the shell history I don’t believe I’ve touched the letsencrypt config on it since I set it up in 2020 ish.
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoNot sure why they are kicking out TLS Client certs, I understand kicking them off the default profile (they REALLY had no place there, not sure why there were there in the first place), but providing no way to get one is a bit silly
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoThe whole thing is very silly security wise anyway. Okay, so you cert leaked. Will having it leaked for 1.5 months be substantially less dangerous than 90 days? Nope, you're fucked from the day one, it's still massively worse than "a browser asynchronously checks whether site's cert has been revoked"
- toddgardner 10mo agoFor all the folks worried about how hard automation is going to be, this is what my team and I have been working on for the past year: https://www.certkit.io/certificate-management https://www.certkit.io/certificate-management You CNAME the acme challenge DNS to us, we manage all your certificates for you. We expose an API and agents to push certificates everywhere you need them, and then do real-time monitoring that the correct certificate is running on the webserver. End-to-end auditability.
- amtamt 10mo agoDon't miss DNS-PERSIST-01 challenge introduction, a related change: https://letsencrypt.org/2025/12/02/from-90-to-45#making-automation-easier-with-a-new-dns-challenge-type https://letsencrypt.org/2025/12/02/from-90-to-45#making-auto... It's not final yet, but interesting development.
- account42 10mo agoSo they're reinventing DANE with extra steps?
- azov 10mo agoWe wanted TLS everywhere for privacy. What we ended up with is every site needs a constant blessing from some semi-centralized authority to remain accessible. Every site is “dead by default”. This feels in many respects worse than what we had with plain HTTP, and we can’t even go back now.
- jmb99 10mo ago> What we ended up with is every site needs a constant blessing from some semi-centralized authority to remain accessible. Do you have any examples of sites that have been blocked by the free ACME providers?
- azov 10mo agoIf you mean that sites with expired certificates may technically be accessible if one jumps through enough hoops and ignores scary warnings - yes, of course you’re right. Maybe this will just teach everyone to click through SSL warnings the same way they click through GDPR popups - for better or worse.
- maltris 10mo agoWondering: Is there a good tool for centralized ACME cert management when one runs a large infrastructure, highly available, multi location where it makes little sense to run the ACME client directly on each instance or location?
- cpach 10mo agoHaven’t tried it myself, but this one looks interesting: https://certifytheweb.com/ https://certifytheweb.com/
- rswail 10mo agoIf I want a client certificate, it sounds like that won't be available any longer from LetsEncrypt > These new intermediates do not contain the “TLS Client Authentication” Extended Key Usage due to an upcoming root program requirement. We have previously announced our plans to end TLS Client Authentication starting in February 2026, which will coincide with the switch to the Generation Y hierarchy. So we use this to authenticate based on our fixed-IP/PTR/DNS to connect server to server to a 3rd party. If we don't have the Client Authentication bit set, then the cert will be invalid for outgoing connections. What do we use instead?
- cpach 10mo agoSo, you will need a CA that are trusted by all parties involved, and one that is not tied to the Web PKI ecosystem. One option is to build your own PKI with it’s own root certificate, and then tell all involved parties to import that into their root cert stores. That’s a lot of work though. If you want to, I think you can buy “private-PKI-as-a-service” from companies like Digicert and Sectigo. And probably from AWS/Google/Azure too. I don’t know the specifics of your environment but it might also be possible to do encryption and signature verification above the transport layer. I.e. sign (and possibly encrypt) the payload itself. Then you might not need mTLS for the connection itself.
- rswail 10mo agoYeah, we've gone down the private CA PKI route, trouble is that you need to start managing your roots and your CA/RA properly, it needs to be auditable etc etc. Cost of a Private CA on AWS is $400/month for a CA that issues certs more than 7 days in duration. That's for one signing CA. If you want PKI with a root, intermediates, and leaves, then the root has to issue intermediates every 7 days as well, or you have your root signing the leaves. On top of that is the infrastructure of the RA, because if you want to automatically issue certs (eg to devices in the field), you need to implement ACME, but you can't necessarily use DNS methods for verification. So you have to roll your own, from a Secure Element that contains a base key that gets diversified by the device's own ID, so it can sign a CSR or an internal DNS server that adds an TXT record for the dns-01 challenge. Then you need the human processes of building the RA, authorizations, ceremonies, etc etc. Or you cut corners.
- pabs3 10mo agoWhen are we going to get certificates signed by multiple vendors?
- cpach 10mo agoWhat would the benefit be?