This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Happy birthday to Let's Encrypt !
Huge thanks to everyone involved in making HTTPS available to everyone for free !
A client of mine pays for an SSL cert he doesn’t even use. I’ve told him before I moved him to Let’s Encrypt because I was able to automate the renew process. He decided he needed to continue paying for the SSL cert. I told him we are not using it, but he doesn’t believe me. So he continues to pay for it.
I love it when companies are too stubborn to update their costs despite the necessity changing over the years.
My previous employment kept buying microsoft office license keys despite us already moving to 365. They probably did it out of habit when buying new computers. Needless to say I have a cardstack of license keys at home lol. Granted it’s for Office 2013 but I don’t really need the latest version for basic document processing.
It doesn't say on the website but on their anniversary day they are giving away unlimited ssl certs!
And my parents still buy SSL certs because that's just what they know 🤢
Today it's just more or less stupid to buy SSL you can get one extremely easy for free from Let's Encrypt or Google Trust..
Yeah, I uh...I think that's kinda what this whole conversation here is about
I've tried explaining to them before, but they think that it's a scam because it's free lol
Can anyone fill me on this? Why is it so significant?
HTTPS certs used to be very expensive and technically complicated, making it out of reach for most smaller orgs. Let's Encrypt brought easy mass adoption and changed encryption availability on the web for everyone.
It is the free, easy way to get an SSL cert (plus automated renewals). Without it, maybe HTTPS wouldn't have been so omnipresent.
And it shouldn't have been, SSL PKI is an intentionally rigged architecture. It's intended for nation-states to be able to abuse it.
I'd like much more some kind of overlay encryption over HTTP based on web of trust and what not. Like those distributed imageboards people were trying to make with steganography in emotion.
It's a trap. Everybody is already in it and it has already been activated, so - the discussion would be of historical interest only.
SSL Certs were so god awful before certbot that it’s hard to explain now that it’s so easy and free.
Also fucking expensive
Lol I instinctively freaked out when I saw the post preview assuming it was going to be a post about a major data breach or exploit of some sort relating to Let's Encrypt.
I probably need more positivity in my life 😂
And it changed the Internet, for good and a lot.
Huge impact on a tiny budget - that’s extremely impressive. The world could be so much better without rent seeking parasites.
Man I love let's encrypt, remember how terrible ssl was before the project landed?
When you have to use it, then yes. But in general standard technologies of today are mostly rigged.
Crazy times. Nowadays it's weird when a website doesn't have https. Back then it was pretty much big companies only. And the price of a wildcard certificate...
Except for neverssl.com
Triggering the launch of captive portals for public Wi-Fi users everywhere yayy
That website says it will never use SSL, but it definitely just connected over https with a valid certificate when I went there.
I always had to fill out multiple pages of forms to get those free 1 year "trial" certs from startssl.
Oh man, I forgot about startssl until just now. I definitely had a few of those certs. If you wanted something fancy like a wildcard cert back then, you were paying $$$
Luckily, wildcard certs are insecure and should be avoided.
Remember they wanted like $75 for certs? The gall.
And if you remember, that this whole shebang was only started, because Snowden revealed that the NSA spied on all of us, it's getting much much darker.
People behave as if having a green lock icon were enough to consider you're safe.
People behave as if there were not multiple cases of abuse of PKI.
People behave as if all those whistleblowing cases exposing widespread illegal activities by the state were not treated as normal, except those exposing them being chased and vilified.
What I'm trying to say is that we're past the stage where techno-optimism about the Internet made sense. They just say in the news that abusing you is good, and everybody just takes it.
I did not have the money to pay the insane amounts these greedy for-profit certificate authorities asked, so I only remember the pain of trying to setup my self-signed root certificate on my several devices/browsers, and then being unable to recover my private key because I went over the top with securing it.
Underrated. Stuff rocks.
Damn! That's definitely a "I'm old" moment for me. I still remember when I first heard about the concept and I remember setting it up the first time on a self hosted project (which seemed harder back then).
Awesome project!
Let's Encrypt is amazing, but are there any equally trustworthy alternatives people could switch to if something bad happens to it?
They came up with the ACME protocol, so presumably somebody could. The real barrier to entry is the cost of getting into that certificate chain of trust. I have no idea why it's so difficult and expensive.
Well, it's difficult, as it should be, because if you control a certificate in the active chain of trust of browsers, you can hack pretty much anything you want.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the CA only signing your public key to prove identity/authority? I don't think the CA can magically MITM every cert they sign.
The impact is serious enough to warrant a $1m entry fee, IMO. At best, someone could impersonate a site. They'd also have to get other things in line (e.g. DNS hijacking) to be at all successful anyway. And it's not like most people are authenticating certs themselves. They just trust browsers to trust CAs that vouch for you and prevents those scary browser warnings.
It doesn't improve encryption compared to a self-signed cert though.
If you are the CA, you can sign a new certificate yourself for google.com and the browser will accept it. It's effectively allows MITM for any certificate. Worse, it's not even limited to certificates under that CA. The browser has no way of knowing there's 2 "valid" certs at once, and in fact that is allowed regardless (multiple servers with different instances of the SSL cert is a possibility).
Certificate pinning might save things, since that will force the same certificate as was previously used, but I'm not sure this is a common default.
If it begins to enshitify, someone will quickly take up the helm. It's become so core now that someone like Cloudflare would just be like "We do this now."
Cloudflare sort of provides this now by being a MITM to secure your site between your server and the end user. But this requires you and your end user to trust Cloudflare.
And fwiw the ACME protocol is open so anyone can implement it. I believe even the ACME software that EFF sends out allows you to choose your server with some configuration.
Yup, it does. I think I still have my server hard coded from when it first launched.
Maybe ZeroSSL
They don't offer wildcard certs, but otherwise I think they are.
I wanna say acme.sh defaults to them.
Never used them, but they state at https://zerossl.com/features/acme/ that their free acme certs include wildcards.
Yay for their glorious, free trusted ssl certs. Love this project!
