21–23 of 23 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because I want to use LE and not other CAs.
That's misguided (I'm assuming you're the server admin). Whether you use any specific CA, like LE, or not, has no security impact. It's about what your users trust and you don't control that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
During normal certificate issuance, they do not generate or see the private key, so they can't compromise the certs they sign for you. Like any other CA, they do have the technical ability to sign arbitrary other certs, so could issue a cert for MITM. As some other comments show, certificate transparency is starting to reduce this risk.
LE does not see the private key but certbot does. Who audits certbot?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not arguing against having the discussion ... my point is that trust in any certificate is reliant on its chain-of-trust and so if Let's Encrypt has this problem, you can't trust other certificates either. But the implication in the head-line is that the NSA/CIA are controlling Let's Encrypt. If that's true, then we've got a real problem ... on the other hand, I think other CAs have shown that, through incompeten…
HTTPS certs provide extraordinary limited security in any case, there is no need to single out lets encrypt. If you can receive a http request destined to the target domain (e.g. via MITM near the real target, DNS hijacking, or route hijacking, or MITM near a CA) then you can get a cert issued for that domain by pretty much any popular CA. With security so limited what would be the purpose of compromising lets encryp…
Is it because you accept that the security provided by HTTPS is limited but don't like people calling that out?
It's better than nothing. But it is my perspective that as technical experts any time we are not absolutely frank about the limitations of the current model against powerful MITM attackers we are behaving unethically.
There is absolutely no reason for any major state attacker to compromise letsencrypt. Beyond the weaknesses I enumerated above state actors have their own CAs which are accepted by browsers and pinning is effectively dead ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Public_Key_Pinning#Browse... ).
What exactly could a state actor hope to accomplish by compromising letsencrypt that they couldn't already do more easily and stealthily?