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Let’s Encrypt: Stopping Issuance for Potential Incident – Resolved

letsencrypt.status.io

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Re: Let’s Encrypt: Stopping Issuance for Potential Incident – Resolved

#41

Post by eqvinox »

striking wrote: post #33
eqvinox wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short-lived = 6 days. Even if you reissue after 2 or 3 days, that's… not a lot of breathing room.

You have to opt in, and they are honest about the tradeoffs when discussing them: > Short-lived certificates are opt-in and we have no plan to make them the default at this time. Subscribers that have fully automated their renewal process should be able to switch to short-lived certificates easily if they wish, but we understand that not everyone is in that position and generally comfortable with this significantly s…

That's not really an answer, especially with:

> We hope that over time everyone moves to automated solutions and we can demonstrate that short-lived certificates work well.

They're expressly trying to show that this is a viable approach. It's actually kinda good that this outage, whatever it is, is happening now, as it's giving them a chance to demonstrate (or not) that they can deliver.

Re: Let’s Encrypt: Stopping Issuance for Potential Incident – Resolved

#44

Post by packetlost »

jcims wrote: post #36
mark_round wrote: post #5

That's really not good. Fortunately I'm not using any short-lived certificates like the recently announced 6 day certs, so have some breathing room. Without further details, I'd imagine anyone with a short-lived cert is getting a bit sweaty right now. Let's Encrypt has become one of those pieces of critical Internet infrastructure that just quietly hums away in the background, the fact that they've stopped ALL issuan…

I just find it incredible that in 30+ years the industry hasn't adapted one bit to the brittle failure modes of certificates. I did some subcontract work with Verisign to deploy their CA infrastructure back in the early oughties and it felt like a solution was overdue way back then. I was at Google in the teensies when gmail broke due to expired SMTP certs. WAAAY overdue by then. Here we are, a decade later and it's…

I mean, what's the alternative? I struggle to come up with a solution that doesn't boil down to the same primitive operations and trust model.

Re: Let’s Encrypt: Stopping Issuance for Potential Incident – Resolved

#45

Post by cedws »

aroman wrote: post #17
cedws wrote: post #7

Discord is out too right now, probably unrelated though.

Just speculating, but I don't think it's unrelated. Discord heavily utilizes Cloudflare, and Cloudflare uses Let's Encrypt for a certificate issuance. If they happened to have a certificate signing dependency in some operational rollout today, I think it could explain it. Certainly the timing is very correlated.

I guess we'll find out but it would be surprising if they use Let's Encrypt for their backend services. The front door is issued by Google Trust Services.

Re: Let’s Encrypt: Stopping Issuance for Potential Incident – Resolved

#46

Post by walrus01 »

gabeio wrote: post #28
jaas wrote: post #19

This is a compliance incident, we should be issuing again shortly. Update: Issuance is back up. Update: Preliminary incident report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2038351

> This is a compliance incident Uh. I don't know if I like the sound of that...

Indeed. "Compliance" can mean some internal audit/monitoring system has tripped and requires in depth investigation and preservation of logging, or it can mean "federal law enforcement with badges are right now standing in our datacenter and/or NOC serving a court order".

Re: Let’s Encrypt: Stopping Issuance for Potential Incident – Resolved

#47

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

jcims wrote: post #36
mark_round wrote: post #5

That's really not good. Fortunately I'm not using any short-lived certificates like the recently announced 6 day certs, so have some breathing room. Without further details, I'd imagine anyone with a short-lived cert is getting a bit sweaty right now. Let's Encrypt has become one of those pieces of critical Internet infrastructure that just quietly hums away in the background, the fact that they've stopped ALL issuan…

I just find it incredible that in 30+ years the industry hasn't adapted one bit to the brittle failure modes of certificates. I did some subcontract work with Verisign to deploy their CA infrastructure back in the early oughties and it felt like a solution was overdue way back then. I was at Google in the teensies when gmail broke due to expired SMTP certs. WAAAY overdue by then. Here we are, a decade later and it's…

Other than automating renewal - which we have made huge strides on - what adaption would you want to see?

Re: Let’s Encrypt: Stopping Issuance for Potential Incident – Resolved

#48

Post by tptacek »

walrus01 wrote: post #46
gabeio wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a compliance incident Uh. I don't know if I like the sound of that...

Indeed. "Compliance" can mean some internal audit/monitoring system has tripped and requires in depth investigation and preservation of logging, or it can mean "federal law enforcement with badges are right now standing in our datacenter and/or NOC serving a court order".

At times like this it's worth remembering that message boards strongly favor whatever narrative is going to be most fun and exciting to talk about.

Re: Let’s Encrypt: Stopping Issuance for Potential Incident – Resolved

#49

Post by walrus01 »

tptacek wrote: post #48
walrus01 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. "Compliance" can mean some internal audit/monitoring system has tripped and requires in depth investigation and preservation of logging, or it can mean "federal law enforcement with badges are right now standing in our datacenter and/or NOC serving a court order".

At times like this it's worth remembering that message boards strongly favor whatever narrative is going to be most fun and exciting to talk about.

I sincerely hope it's the most mundane and least spectacular explanation possible, just saying from my point above that compliance has a very wide range of possible meanings and interpretations (also depending on the background/career POV of the reader), until the incident is further explained..
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