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Early Impacts of Let's Encrypt

tacticalsecret.com

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Re: Early Impacts of Let's Encrypt

#51
post #9

Does anyone know where one can get a free wildcard certificate? Need it for development and foo/bar/baz/biff.example.com change names regularly (they include the hash of the code commit) so I would like to get a *.dev.example.com wildcard cert. (one that won't give warnings that scare the business types who are testing the code, and won't understand what self-signed means.)

If it's just for local development, you can make a self-signed certificate and add it as trusted to your browser(s).

Re: Early Impacts of Let's Encrypt

#52
post #7
post #5

I've used them a bunch. We host a lot of internal-facing utilities that are low-profile, but occasionally hosting sensitive data. In the past I couldn't convince managers to spend money on certs even if the cost of someone stumbling on these sites could be very high and certs are cheap. Now I don't even have to ask.

Keep in mind that Let's Encrypt publishes a searchable list of all domains issued. https://crt.sh/?Identity=%25&iCAID=7395

As far as I can tell, the website can not be used to browse all certificates directly; when the number was at 500k, the site would consistently time out when trying to fetch the oldest ~250k.

Is the raw data available somewhere?

On a completely different and off-topic note, as someone who would normally just handle my certificate needs by piping together 10 openssl commands, your ACME client is super handy!

Re: Early Impacts of Let's Encrypt

#54
post #9

Does anyone know where one can get a free wildcard certificate? Need it for development and foo/bar/baz/biff.example.com change names regularly (they include the hash of the code commit) so I would like to get a *.dev.example.com wildcard cert. (one that won't give warnings that scare the business types who are testing the code, and won't understand what self-signed means.)

You could automate getting Let's Encrypt certificates, so it can automatically generate a certificate for each domain.

Re: Early Impacts of Let's Encrypt

#56
post #52
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that Let's Encrypt publishes a searchable list of all domains issued. https://crt.sh/?Identity=%25&iCAID=7395

As far as I can tell, the website can not be used to browse all certificates directly; when the number was at 500k, the site would consistently time out when trying to fetch the oldest ~250k. Is the raw data available somewhere? On a completely different and off-topic note, as someone who would normally just handle my certificate needs by piping together 10 openssl commands, your ACME client is super handy!

The raw data is publicly available on Certificate Transparency log servers[1]. There are various clients for CT log servers out there, but they all require you to essentially download the entire log to query it (there's no query API).

[1]: https://www.certificate-transparency.org/known-logs

Re: Early Impacts of Let's Encrypt

#57
post #9

Does anyone know where one can get a free wildcard certificate? Need it for development and foo/bar/baz/biff.example.com change names regularly (they include the hash of the code commit) so I would like to get a *.dev.example.com wildcard cert. (one that won't give warnings that scare the business types who are testing the code, and won't understand what self-signed means.)

Other than Amazon Certificate Manager as moatra mentions (which I don't think let's you export the certificate), I don't think there is currently an option for free wildcard certificates. As an alternative you could incorporate provisioning of a Let's Encrypt certificate for the new subdomain into your deployment process since the process is designed to be automated.

Not if you have more than five subdomains, you have to wait for a week, like me.

Re: Early Impacts of Let's Encrypt

#58
post #26
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your CA should not be in a position to send you your private key. They don't need it in order to sign your certificate. Pretty much every CA I'm aware of allows you to provide your own CSR (which only includes your public key). Sending the certificate (as opposed to the private key) via email is fine, since that only includes your public key, which is visible to every site visitor anyway. (I agree that an automated p…

Agreed a thousand percent, but there are services that offer easy installs onto cloud providers that do know your private key - that's how they get it onto your ELB or Heroku.

If you can restrict the service to a subdomain, there are alternatives like the SAN extension that allow those third parties to avoid handling your private key at a small extra cost.

Re: Early Impacts of Let's Encrypt

#59
post #9

Does anyone know where one can get a free wildcard certificate? Need it for development and foo/bar/baz/biff.example.com change names regularly (they include the hash of the code commit) so I would like to get a *.dev.example.com wildcard cert. (one that won't give warnings that scare the business types who are testing the code, and won't understand what self-signed means.)

CloudFlare does that. You could run a self-signed certificate on your server, relying on the wildcard certificate CloudFlare generated to do its proxying of your domain.

Re: Early Impacts of Let's Encrypt

#60
post #9

Does anyone know where one can get a free wildcard certificate? Need it for development and foo/bar/baz/biff.example.com change names regularly (they include the hash of the code commit) so I would like to get a *.dev.example.com wildcard cert. (one that won't give warnings that scare the business types who are testing the code, and won't understand what self-signed means.)

You could automate getting Let's Encrypt certificates, so it can automatically generate a certificate for each domain.

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