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10 Years of Let's Encrypt

letsencrypt.org

21–30 of 361 posts

Re: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

#21

New baseline expectation that web traffic will be encrypted on the wire: very good! New de-facto requirement that you need to receive the blessing of a CA to make use of basic web platform features... not so good.

That's not new, LetsEncrypt just didn't solve it. And if you think this is the only single point of failure in the stack, I have news for you.

Re: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

#22
post #5

Let's Encrypt was _huge_ in making it's absurd to not have TLS and now we (I, at least) take it for granted because it's just the baseline for any website I build. Incredible, free service that helped make the web a more secure place. What a wonderful service - thank you to the entire team. The CEO at my last company (2022) refused to use Let's Encrypt because "it looked cheap to customers". That is absurd to me beca…

There was a time when EV certificates were considered more trustworthy than DV certs. Browsers used to show an indication for EV certs.

Those days are long gone, and I'm not completely sure how I feel about it. I hated the EV renewal/rotation process, so definitely a win on the day-to-day scale, but I still feel like something was lost in the transition.

Re: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

#23
post #5

Let's Encrypt was _huge_ in making it's absurd to not have TLS and now we (I, at least) take it for granted because it's just the baseline for any website I build. Incredible, free service that helped make the web a more secure place. What a wonderful service - thank you to the entire team. The CEO at my last company (2022) refused to use Let's Encrypt because "it looked cheap to customers". That is absurd to me beca…

> has anyone actually commented to you in a negative way about using Let's Encrypt?

A friend of mine has had a negative experience insofar as they are working for a small company, using maybe only 15–20 certs and one day they started getting hounded by Let's Encrypt multiple times on the email address they used for ACME registration.

Let's Encrcypt were chasing donations and were promptly told where to stick it with their unsolicited communications. Let's Encrypt also did zero research about who they were targetting, i.e. trying to get a small company to shell out $50k as a "donation".

My friend was of the opinion is that if you're going to charge, then charge, but don't offer it for free and then go looking for payment via the backdoor.

In a business environment getting a donation approved is almost always an entirely different process, involving completely different people in the company, than getting a product or service purchase approved. Even more so if, like Let's Encrypt, you are turning up on the doorstep asking for $50k a pop.

Re: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

#24
post #5

Let's Encrypt was _huge_ in making it's absurd to not have TLS and now we (I, at least) take it for granted because it's just the baseline for any website I build. Incredible, free service that helped make the web a more secure place. What a wonderful service - thank you to the entire team. The CEO at my last company (2022) refused to use Let's Encrypt because "it looked cheap to customers". That is absurd to me beca…

To be fair, for a CEO in 2022, EV certificates had only lost their special visualizations since September/October 2019 with Chrome 77 and Firefox 70 - and with all that would happen in the following months, one could be forgiven for not adapting to new browser best practices!

https://www.troyhunt.com/extended-validation-certificates-ar...

Re: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

#25

New baseline expectation that web traffic will be encrypted on the wire: very good! New de-facto requirement that you need to receive the blessing of a CA to make use of basic web platform features... not so good.

That's not new, LetsEncrypt just didn't solve it. And if you think this is the only single point of failure in the stack, I have news for you.

It's absolutely new. No HTML5 features were restricted to secure origins only pre-LE. Today, many are. Google was able to push these requirements in large part due to Let's Encrypt's success making secure origins ubiquitous.

Re: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

#26

New baseline expectation that web traffic will be encrypted on the wire: very good! New de-facto requirement that you need to receive the blessing of a CA to make use of basic web platform features... not so good.

Can you elaborate a bit about what you mean by "the blessing of a CA"?

I agree that it's true that you need a certificate to do TLS, but importantly Let's Encrypt isn't interested in what you do with your certificate, just that you actually control the domain name. See: https://letsencrypt.org/2015/10/29/phishing-and-malware.html

Re: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

#28
post #22
post #5

Let's Encrypt was _huge_ in making it's absurd to not have TLS and now we (I, at least) take it for granted because it's just the baseline for any website I build. Incredible, free service that helped make the web a more secure place. What a wonderful service - thank you to the entire team. The CEO at my last company (2022) refused to use Let's Encrypt because "it looked cheap to customers". That is absurd to me beca…

There was a time when EV certificates were considered more trustworthy than DV certs. Browsers used to show an indication for EV certs. Those days are long gone, and I'm not completely sure how I feel about it. I hated the EV renewal/rotation process, so definitely a win on the day-to-day scale, but I still feel like something was lost in the transition.

What about OV?

Re: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

#29
post #3

Wow. Feels like Let’s encrypt been around for longer.

Agreed! What were we using before Let's Encrypt again? Maybe just plain HTTP

I was using StartCom StartSSL which was offering free 1 year certificates at least for my personal sites.

Re: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

#30
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time when EV certificates were considered more trustworthy than DV certs. Browsers used to show an indication for EV certs. Those days are long gone, and I'm not completely sure how I feel about it. I hated the EV renewal/rotation process, so definitely a win on the day-to-day scale, but I still feel like something was lost in the transition.

What about OV?

It's never been clear to me what the rationale for OV was, as the UI wasn't even different like EV was.
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