I'm sure some people would find this useful but forgive me if I'm not ready to hand away my security to some unknown third party company. I don't know the first thing about CAs but Let's Encrypt really isn't that difficult to understand.
I believe the intent here is: * If you want an SSL certificate for, say, your printer * And you don’t want to expose your printer’s port 80 to the public internet because you’re not stupid * And you don’t want to put your DNS credentials onto your printer either, because again, you’re not stupid * And you don’t want to pay for a certificate with a longer validity, because it’s a home printer, so you’re stitch with mo…
Show HN: Anchor Relay – A faster, easier way to get Let's Encrypt certificates
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Re: Show HN: Anchor Relay – A faster, easier way to get Let's Encrypt certificates
#22Does this means that you have the ability to a) impersonate the identities of your users and b) decrypt the SSL traffic of your users ?
It does not. Anchor never see sees your private keys for certificates. We hold an ACME account key on your behalf with the CA, but we cannot use it impersonate your domain or decrypt traffic. We have a more technical overview of how this works in our docs: https://anchor.dev/docs/public-certs/acme-relay
That makes no sense whatsoever. If you have an ACME account key for my domain, of course you can use it to impersonate my domain. You just need to create another certificate. (Which I could detect, but if I know how to do that, I'm probably not going to need your service anyway.)
Re: Show HN: Anchor Relay – A faster, easier way to get Let's Encrypt certificates
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe the intent here is: * If you want an SSL certificate for, say, your printer * And you don’t want to expose your printer’s port 80 to the public internet because you’re not stupid * And you don’t want to put your DNS credentials onto your printer either, because again, you’re not stupid * And you don’t want to pay for a certificate with a longer validity, because it’s a home printer, so you’re stitch with mo…
> * If you want an SSL certificate for, say, your printer Ummmm why does my printer need a certificate?
...then (at least in theory!) there's no reason to not also give every one of those devices, with their public-routable IPv6 addresses, a stable public-rooted name — i.e. a DNS FQDN.
Mind you, none of the infrastructure to make this work exists.
For example, while DDNS exists, it really only exists to assign your gateway router itself a name — with the expectation being that you're using NAT, and then having your router port-forward any interior services to masquerade them as being services of the router.
A theoretical "DDNSv6", meanwhile, would instead expose your entire LAN as AAAA records under your DDNS suffix — much like how e.g. `tailscale share` exposes devices as device.yournetwork.ts.net. But using plain public-routed IPv6, rather than proprietary overlay routing.
The problem with this being that neither routers nor IoT devices have any way to assign DNS-like names to devices on your network. So where would these device names come from? (If it were me, I'd have the router observe mDNS announcements from these devices, and then suffix-replace `.local` in the mDNS name with the configured DDNS suffix to build AAAA records. But even then, some devices don't even do mDNS!)
And then, even if you do that, there's still nowhere for the TLS cert for your printer to live under this scheme. The printer itself has no concept of speaking TLS. (Why would it? It expects to only ever be local-segment routable, and for physical access to the network segment to be the sum total of its security mechanism.) To work around this, you'd need your gateway router to do L7 IPv6 routing (imagine if your router worked like Cloudflare DNS, where you could "orange cloud" your LAN devices) so that the router itself could 1. force itself as the default route for the device, even for LAN-to-LAN packets; and then 2. terminate the TLS connection if the device is being spoken to on port 443; but just act as a dumb passthrough otherwise.
Re: Show HN: Anchor Relay – A faster, easier way to get Let's Encrypt certificates
#24Re: Show HN: Anchor Relay – A faster, easier way to get Let's Encrypt certificates
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
If users delegate their DNS to you, what's stopping you issuing a certificate to yourself for their site?
We theoretically could, but those certificates would show up in CT logs. (For quick & easy monitoring, you can get an RSS feed for your domain on https://crt.sh/ , but it's not the most reliable service.) It would be a reputation killer if we did that, just like it would be for your DNS provider or ISP.
Re: Show HN: Anchor Relay – A faster, easier way to get Let's Encrypt certificates
#26Re: Show HN: Anchor Relay – A faster, easier way to get Let's Encrypt certificates
#27I’ve never understood why there isn’t an easy way (ie that never expires) to use certificates or otherwise encrypt communications. I’m mainly referring to unique or internal use cases where the complications around certificates expiring has made it so that those communications end up unencrypted (SSL disabled). I guess what I’m saying is I’ve come across many cases where even bad encryption is better than plaintext,…
Where is this? Why would bad encryption be better than plaintext? I can't imagine a scenario where this is the case.
Re: Show HN: Anchor Relay – A faster, easier way to get Let's Encrypt certificates
#28I’ve never understood why there isn’t an easy way (ie that never expires) to use certificates or otherwise encrypt communications. I’m mainly referring to unique or internal use cases where the complications around certificates expiring has made it so that those communications end up unencrypted (SSL disabled). I guess what I’m saying is I’ve come across many cases where even bad encryption is better than plaintext,…
The browser limits on maximum certificate lifetimes only apply to the public web PKI, not to CAs that you configure yourself.
Re: Show HN: Anchor Relay – A faster, easier way to get Let's Encrypt certificates
#29Oh dear. I'm sorry. But do you really need to re-invent the wheel yet again ? Go to the Let's Encrypt website, there is a whole page of client implementations[1]. What makes yours better than, for example, `lego` or `caddy` or `step` ? All of which are easy to use, come with sensible defaults and do not provide you with "innumerable ways to shoot yourself in the foot". And for people who really can't use Let's Encryp…
The point of acme-dns is for people who 1) need to use DNS validation because they don't have an externally accessible web server or need a wildcard cert and 2) either use DNS providers that don't provide API support or whose API support has not been integrated into their tool of choice like cert-manager or certbot.
I have had to use ACME-DNS for that reason, and I don't think it is a horrible business to try to offer that as a service. I don't think I would use it (since acme-dns isn't that hard to set up and I am familiar with it), but I could imagine other people might want to.
Re: Show HN: Anchor Relay – A faster, easier way to get Let's Encrypt certificates
#30for everyone willing to put a tiny amount of effort in, you can just: 1. Install acme-dns somewhere 2. Point part of your domain to that 3. Use lego or caddy or whatever to get certs using dns-01 No need to pay some dude who can then forge certs for your domain.