31–40 of 321 posts
On the face of it wildcard certs seem easy to implement - just match anything in place of the * - but clearly that's not the case as it took years to complete, anyone mind sharing some of the subtle challenges and complexities involved
From the CA's perspective or the subscriber's perspective?
Can anyone list any negatives of Let's Encrypt? I've been using it since the start and just can't find any practical downsides.
The only significant concern I have is that if LE were to essentially "take over" the CA industry, you know, due to being free, and awesome, we'd have a massive single point of failure for the entire Internet's security model. My biggest peeve with the whole "HTTPS Everywhere" push is not the general notion of using encryption, but that the encryption is annoyingly coupled with the CA system, which is terrible for ma…
First, congrats, this is great news! There's a lot of use cases out there that require a wildcard cert or work far better with them. > It is our intent to transition all clients and subscribers to ACMEv2, though we have not set an end-of-life date for our ACMEv1 API yet. Please don't do this. It will break millions of sites needlessly. Most installations of lets encrypt plugins aren't going to auto update to v2. A lo…
When you run the Let's Encrypt official client (certbot), it updates itself.
(I'm on the Certbot team.)
Also, some people dislike this feature quite a bit, and there are about 100 different clients.
DNS providers and domain name registration companies are probably going to get pestered about API access for updating TXT DNS records now... :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure how the availability of wildcard certs changes that scenario, if I can set the DNS record for secure-payments.yourbusiness.com then I can get a non-wildcard cert for it and get on with the spamming straight away
I think it's somewhat difficult to get a valid (CA-valid) certificate for a domain you don't own, though. At least, that's what the job of the CAs is: to verify that the certs they're issuing are for the actual owner of yourbusiness.com.
LE is all about DV certs -- you just need to control the web server at secure-payments.yourbusiness.com, and with DNS control you can aim secure-payments.yourbusiness.com anywhere
First, congrats, this is great news! There's a lot of use cases out there that require a wildcard cert or work far better with them. > It is our intent to transition all clients and subscribers to ACMEv2, though we have not set an end-of-life date for our ACMEv1 API yet. Please don't do this. It will break millions of sites needlessly. Most installations of lets encrypt plugins aren't going to auto update to v2. A lo…
Obviously a decent length of grace period would be the correct way of deprecating the older version, to give people time to update their infrastructure accordingly. I would suggest at least a full year (giving at least four renewal cycles to test changes in a QA environment before being forced to update production), probably more. Perhaps, if possible, a year for new certificates and two years for renewals?
Can anyone list any negatives of Let's Encrypt? I've been using it since the start and just can't find any practical downsides.
The only significant concern I have is that if LE were to essentially "take over" the CA industry, you know, due to being free, and awesome, we'd have a massive single point of failure for the entire Internet's security model. My biggest peeve with the whole "HTTPS Everywhere" push is not the general notion of using encryption, but that the encryption is annoyingly coupled with the CA system, which is terrible for ma…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only significant concern I have is that if LE were to essentially "take over" the CA industry, you know, due to being free, and awesome, we'd have a massive single point of failure for the entire Internet's security model. My biggest peeve with the whole "HTTPS Everywhere" push is not the general notion of using encryption, but that the encryption is annoyingly coupled with the CA system, which is terrible for ma…
The encryption part is easy -- you don't need CAs for that -- but they're a necessary evil when it comes to verifying ownership. You need to delegate trust to someone , otherwise using the internet becomes too cumbersome.
CAs seem like a system that really doesn't work today, we've seen multiple times that many of these CAs aren't worth delegating trust to to begin with, and it causes an unnecessary cost and burden upon just... encrypting traffic.
DNS providers and domain name registration companies are probably going to get pestered about API access for updating TXT DNS records now... :)
I started using Cloudflare just for their DNS API - the dynDNS providers baked into my router's firmware went under so I started pointing the DNS record to my home dynamic IP with a cronjob that called CF's API.