I've been downloading SSL certificates from my domain provider, using cat to join them together to make the fullchain.pem, uploading them to the server, and myself adding a 90 day calendar reminder. Every time I did this I'd think I should find out about this Certbot thing.
Well, I finally got around to it, and it was one of those jobs which turns out to be so easy you wish you'd done it ages ago.
The install was simple (I'm using nginx/ubuntu).
It scans up your server conf files to see which sites are being served, asks you a couple of questions, obtains the Let's Encrypt certificate for them, installs it, updates your conf files to use it, and sets up a cron job to check if it's time to renew the certificate, which it will also do auto-magically.
I was so pleased with it I made a donation to the EFF for it, then I started to think about how amazingly useful Let's Encrypt is, and gave them one too. It's just a really good time to be in this hobby.
I highly recommend Certbot. If you've been putting this off, or only just hearing about it, make some time for it.
Downloading certificates from your domain provider is often a security problem. Only you are supposed to know your private keys.
You're supposed to upload the CSR, not the key.
But yeah, if they do all the generation themselves, they also have the private key and could easily break into anything the cert is used for.
Good point. Although they are also hosting my DNS, so they can take the site over anytime they want anyway?
They could hijack your site at any time, but with a copy of your live private certs they (or more likely whatever third party that will invariably breach your domain provider) can decrypt your otherwise secure traffic.
I don't think there's significant real tangible risk since who cares about your private selfhosted services and I'd be more worried about the domain being hijacked, and really any sort of network breach is probably interested in finding delicious credit card numbers and passwords and crypto private keys to munch on. If someone got into my network, spying on my Jellyfin streaming isn't what I'm going to be worried about.
But it is why CSRs are used.
Thanks - I hadn't considered the traffic decryption.