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10 Years of Let's Encrypt

letsencrypt.org

141–150 of 361 posts

Re: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

#141
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Call me old-school, but I really liked how EV certs looked in the browser. I agree, making EV Certs visually more important makes sense to people who know what it means and what it doesn't. Too bad they never made it an optional setting.

When you request an EV. They call you by the phone number that you give to ask if you requested a certificate. That was the complete extend of the validation. I could be a scammer with a specificity designed domain name and they would just accept it, no questions asked.

I'd love a referral to your certificate authority and rep - we go through a big kerfluffle each renewal period, only eventually receiving the certificate after a long exchange of government docs and CPA letters. For us, only the last step is the phonecall like you say.

Re: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you request an EV. They call you by the phone number that you give to ask if you requested a certificate. That was the complete extend of the validation. I could be a scammer with a specificity designed domain name and they would just accept it, no questions asked.

I'd love a referral to your certificate authority and rep - we go through a big kerfluffle each renewal period, only eventually receiving the certificate after a long exchange of government docs and CPA letters. For us, only the last step is the phonecall like you say.

The replies to my original comment make it obvious who has gotten an EV cert from a quality CA before and who hasn't.

Re: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

#143
post #38
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Call me old-school, but I really liked how EV certs looked in the browser. Same with the big green lock icon Firefox used to have. I know it's all theatrics at best and a scam at worst, but I really feel like it's a bit of a downgrade.

it’s okay, the scam continues with BIMI

Re: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

#144
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen people complain that Let's Encrypt is so easy that it's enabling the forced phaseout of long-lived certificates and unencrypted HTTP. I sort of understand this, although it does feel like going "bcrypt is so easy to use it's enabling standards agencies to force me to use something newer than MD5". Like, yeah, once the secure way is sufficiently easy to use, we can then push everyone off the insecure way; th…

Random anecdote: I have a device in which the http client can't handle https. Runs out of memory and crashes. Wasn't able to find a free host with a public http to host a proxy.

What is the device, if I may ask?

Re: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

#145

It’s easy to forget how awful TLS was before Let’s Encrypt: you’d pay per-hostname, file tickets, manually validate domains, and then babysit a 1-year cert renewal calendar. Today it’s basically “install an ACME client once and forget it” and the web quietly shifted from The impressive bit isn’t just the crypto, it’s that they attacked the operational problem: automation (ACME), good client ecosystem, and a nonprofit…

For IoT myself i'm wondering if it's something that could be thrown into the Matter side of things, make the hub/border router act as an ACME server with it's own CA that gives out mTLS certs so the devices can validate the hub and the hub can validate the devices. It'd never be implemented properly by the swarms of cheap hardware out there but I can dream...

Re: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

#146
Is there a notion of tier 1 and tier 2 certificates? Like if I setup paid and backed by contract agreements with a cert provider, does this give users more confidence that their lock icon in the browser actually means they are talking to who they think they are?

It's one thing to provide a cert to provide secure encrypted TLS, it's another thing to establish identity with the user. Though, most users would never notice either way.

Re: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

#147
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen people complain that Let's Encrypt is so easy that it's enabling the forced phaseout of long-lived certificates and unencrypted HTTP. I sort of understand this, although it does feel like going "bcrypt is so easy to use it's enabling standards agencies to force me to use something newer than MD5". Like, yeah, once the secure way is sufficiently easy to use, we can then push everyone off the insecure way; th…

I can understand this in in certain contexts, such as a site that exists solely to post public information of no value to an attacker. A local volunteer group that posts their event schedule to the web were compelled to take on the burden of https just to keep their site from being labeled as a potential threat. They don't have an IT department. They aren't tech people. The change multiplied the hassles of maintainin…

The work and technical expertise to setup let's encrypt is less than the work to register a domain, set up a web server, and configure DNS to point to it.

Re: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

#148
10 great years.

For the next years I'm hoping for more resilience/global distribution in the issuance process. Since I live on an island for about half the year I do have experience with internet outages, and we do appear to live in turbulent times. That could be an issue with the ever decreasing certificate lifetime. I'd love to see LE exploring options like working with ccTLD registrars to work on local issuance.

Re: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

#150
post #36

As a sysadmin in the 2007-2011 timeframe I literally used openssl to generate csrs, went to godaddy to purchase SSL certificates and then manually deployed them to servers. Man what a world of change. Let's encrypt is one the best services we've had on the internet. I wish we had more things like this.

Ah man, I remember those days. So tedious!
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