10 Years of Let's Encrypt

I'm glad LE, browsers, and others like Cloudflare brought this cost to $0. Eliminating this unnecessary cost is good for the internet.

I kind of wish they still had it, and I kind of wish browsers indicated that a cert was signed by a global CA (real cert store trusted by the browsers) or an aftermarket CA, so people can see that their stuff is being decrypted by their company.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46038099

There's certainly advantages to easily available certificates, but that has enabled browsers and others to push too far; to be sure, though, that's not really a fault of Let's Encrypt, just the people who assume it's somehow globally applicable.

The problem is that this requires work and validation, which no beancounter ever plans for. And the underlings have to do the work, but don't get extra time, so it has to be crammed in, condensing the workday even more. For hobbyist projects it's even worse.

That is why people are so pissed, there is absolutely zero control over what the large browser manufacturers decide on a whim. It's one thing if banks or Facebook or other truly large entities get to do work... but personal blogs and the likes?

A local volunteer group that posts their event schedule to the web were compelled to take on the burden of https just to keep their site from being labeled as a potential threat. They don't have an IT department. They aren't tech people. The change multiplied the hassles of maintaining their site. To them, it is all additional cost with no practical benefit over what they had before.

It's shady, but technically not price-fixing unless they are a monopoly. You are free to take your business to somewhere else.

>trying to get a small company to shell out $50k as a "donation".

>Even more so if, like Let's Encrypt, you are turning up on the doorstep asking for $50k a pop.

Does your friend have anything to corroborate this claim? Perhaps the email with identifying details censored?

I have a received an occasional email mentioning donations. They are extremely infrequent and never ask me for a specific amount. I would be incredibly surprised to see evidence of "hounding" and requests for $50,000.

EVs are not a scam per-se, but they also don't add any value. 80% of the world already figured that out, do by definition if you are asking you are in the bottom 20%.

Now I get you were in the process of migration, but that's an edge case. In a normal case if you go around asking to buy a wildcard EV, you basically have a sign saying "fleece me".

So yeah, there's still a market for people wanting to throw money at CAs, even in these comments you'll see some. And management types are especially prone to "sounds expensive, must be good" logic when spending other people's money.

I've got a website I build for a friend running that I haven't touched in 5 years TLS-wise, never had any issues.

Do you think Let's encrypt is less popular outside the US?

There's no reliable source of truth for your home network. Neither the local (m)DNS nor the IP addresses nor the MAC addresses hold any extrinsic meaning. You could certainly run the standard ACME challenges, but neither success nor failure would carry much weight.

And then the devices themselves have no way of knowing your hub/router/AP is legitimate. You'd have to have some way of getting the CA certificate on to them that couldn't be easily spoofed.

EDIT: There is a draft for a new ACME challenge called dns-persist-01, which mentions IoT, but I'm not really sure how it helps that use case exactly: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-acme-dns-pe...

(Of course the same page have GoogleAnalytics and facebook button -- otherwise it would be too secure.)

It is possible that there's a retcon element, because it's not always clear in my memory exactly what year various sites became more favorably disposed towards the request to use HTTPS. So I could be misremembering some of them as agreeing post-Snowden when they'd actually agreed one year before, or something.

Google started tracking adoption of TLS in 2015, with adoption below 50% and some regions below 30%.

https://transparencyreport.google.com/https/overview?hl=en

Most users and system owners didn't care unless money was being transacted.

Between Snowden and ISPs injecting content into pages, the consensus changed.

So, I wouldn't be so sure, unfortunately.

Because they want your money. If they ask you after they get to keep your money.

   $ curl -v letsdecrypt.org
   * Host letsdecrypt.org:80 was resolved.
   * IPv6: (none)
   * IPv4: 62.116.130.8
   *   Trying 62.116.130.8:80...
   * Connected to letsdecrypt.org (62.116.130.8) port 80
   * using HTTP/1.x
   > GET / HTTP/1.1
   > Host: letsdecrypt.org
   > User-Agent: curl/8.14.1
   > Accept: */*
   > 
   * Request completely sent off
   < HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
   < Server: nginx
   < Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:20:48 GMT
   < Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
   < Transfer-Encoding: chunked
   < Connection: keep-alive
   < X-Redirector-ID: 14c2d856bcd2de3beae30791793b40ae43db49fc9ea482a825177a36e20108c4
   < Location: http://www.nsa.gov/
   < IX-Cache-Status: MISS
   < 
   * Connection #0 to host letsdecrypt.org left intact

Edit: Ah, over HTTPS protocol it doesn't respond.

   $ curl -v https://letsdecrypt.org
   * Host letsdecrypt.org:443 was resolved.
   * IPv6: (none)
   * IPv4: 62.116.130.8
   *   Trying 62.116.130.8:443...

And you try telling young people that ACME is a walk in the park, and they won't believe you...

Besides, I don't use wildcard certs. I use caddy to reverse proxy a number of self-hosting things, and manually assign domain names to each of them. Caddy can handles many certs just fine.

Long shot? Yes. But not impossible.

WebPKI also suffers from an inability to properly do delegation. It's not possible for me to create an intermediary certificate valid only for *.mycompany.com

If I want to use WebPKI, I have to either expose every host inside my company to everyone (via CT transparency logs) or use a wildcard certificate. And wildcard certs allow attackers to impersonate anything within my domain, if they get access to just one host.

X.509 technically supports name constraints ( https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5280#section-4.2.1.10 ), but its implementation was inconsistent. In particular, some implementations did not apply it to the Common Name. Fortunately, Common Name is on the path to deprecation.

I actually remember the discussion we had in ~2014 about what the default certificate lifetime should be. My opening bid was two weeks -- roughly the lifetime of an OCSP response. The choice to issue certificates with 90 day lifetimes was still quite aggressive in 2015, but it was a compromise with an even more aggressive position.

The side-effect of this is that they become incapable of doing it any faster during an emergency. Private key compromised? Renewal takes two months, so better hope the attackers can't do too much damage before that. CAs in turn have large (=profitable) customers which such processes who they really don't want to lose, so historically when they've failed to renew in time during incidents CAs have granted those customers exceptions on the revocation rules because they are "business critical" and doing it by-the-book would cause "significant harm". No CA is willing to be strict, because they'd lose their most valuable customers to their competition.

The only way to solve this is to force companies into adopting efficient renewal processes via an industry-wide reduction of certificate validity time. When you have to renew once a month you can't afford to have a complicated process, so you end up automating it, so there's no reason for CAs to delay cert revocation during incidents, so the internet is more secure. And because every CA is doing it, companies don't gain anything by switching to more lenient CAs, so the individual CAs have no incentive to violate the industry rules by delaying revocation.

The why is because it's safer: it reduces the validity period of private keys that could be used in a MITM attack if they're leaked. It also encourages automation of cert renewal which is also more secure. It also makes responding to incidents at certificate authorities more practical.

Your pain and intolerance to that button push proves their intent.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46210786

Might be related to https://www.teaminternet.de/en/parkingcrew

It's too bad the same hasn't happened to software notarization and signing systems.

People will argue that having payments enforced some accountability, but I'm not really convinced.

Corporate existence is dependent on some form of government regulator granting the corporation existence.

If EVs are/were a good idea (debatable at best), then having those EVs issued by the same government regulator that allows corporates to use trademarks etc makes sense.

If "apple" is a trademark for computers, then Apple Computer Inc as the owner of that trademark should get an EV issued by the regulator of trademarks.

Of course, the URL should be apple.com.us or apple.tm.us.

The historical error was not requiring the US to move to 2LDs for it's com/org/net/gov/mil etc domains.

Note this is for corporate entities, none of which exist outside regulatory environments.

Assuming certificate expiration times remain over 7 days per certificate.

- LetsEncrypt don't have the private key tied to your certificate - Any of the Certificate Authorities could potentially emit unauthorized certificate

Your only protection for all of these problems is HPKP. If you prefer to keep things in Europe, keep that pinned private key in Europe, but the rest doesn't matter.

That said, it's pretty nice that LetsEncrypt forced the ACME protocol on this industry. Not only it create redundancy with mostly interchangeable alternatives but before ACME, there was no way to fully automate certificate provisioning cleanly.

The confusing thing is that this goal nonetheless appeared in some original marketing and explanations about the web PKI from the late 1990s when it was first introduced. There was another smaller burst of this when people were arguing over the formalization of DV certificates and of Google's UI changes that stopped treating EV specially (as some people found both of those changes objectionable).

I agree with you that the goal of authenticating entities was impractical, but the mental association and expectation around it still hasn't been completely dispelled. (I think I saw some form of this when doing support on the Let's Encrypt Community Forum, as people would sometimes complain that a site shouldn't have been allowed to have a certificate, either because it wasn't the organization they expected, or because it was malicious somehow.)

It's essentially a self-signed cert that anyone could make with the false security of a root certificate authority.