That explains why one of my IoT vendors is using an expired certificate. I wish Firefox would just give a mild warning for a recently expired certificate, instead of treating it the same as a true man-in-the-middle attach. It's not like someone who couldn't factor the private key in 200 days could in 201 days or even 300 days. I'm convinced that we'd have better security, if we didn't have so much security theater. Y…
Let's Encrypt had a higher error rate for 90 minutes today
91–100 of 115 posts
Re: Let's Encrypt had a higher error rate for 90 minutes today
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
One is not really better, you want both. Certificate revocation lists are loaded out of band and depending on the client can be poorly enforced. Questions come up: do you block a request if you fail to download the latest CRL? How often do you refresh it? When the cert expires, it can be removed from the CRL, so shorter lived certs will allow CRLs to be smaller and faster to transfer.
> Questions come up: do you block a request if you fail to download the latest CRL? How often do you refresh it? In the before times we left settings like this up to competent system administrators to decide based on risk and not hardcoded by a handful of people at Google.
Sorry, we don't hire those anymore.
Best I can do is a YAML monkey who knows how to glue cloud services together..
Re: Let's Encrypt had a higher error rate for 90 minutes today
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Revoking doesn’t really work. https://garantir.io/certificate-revocation-challenges-and-be...
Stale news. Mozilla introduced a new solution for certificate revocation that solves nearly all the problems with old methods. While it hasn't really taken off outside of Firefox, that's mostly because Google and Apple haven't embraced it because they are too busy trying to shorten certificate life unnecessarily. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2025/08/crlite-fast-private-and-co...
Re: Let's Encrypt had a higher error rate for 90 minutes today
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see you are unfamiliar with status page-ese. “Degraded performance” is a term which means some form of “the entire datacenter is probably on fire”.
That would a Microsoft'ese, "Some regions are encountering issues" => "The entire world is down, but our status page is working"
Re: Let's Encrypt had a higher error rate for 90 minutes today
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using only color to communicate the status is confusing. If you want to communicate something, it's often best to just say it. The color can be a visual reinforcement of that. Then your explanation would not be needed.
We do say it. That's what the "Incident Status" field is there for.
Re: Let's Encrypt had a higher error rate for 90 minutes today
#96To be clear, “Degraded Performance” means just that, not “down.” Let’s Encrypt’s issuance is mostly working fine.
> Some clients may encounter 400 and 500 error responses.
Re: Let's Encrypt had a higher error rate for 90 minutes today
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feel free to launch your own CA.
No-no, I would rather go back to the good old HTTP/1.1. P.S. JS injection into TCP packets and other meddling with passthrough data should be banned legally, not technically via encryption.
Re: Let's Encrypt had a higher error rate for 90 minutes today
#98Seems not ideal for an entity who seems to be pushing for shorter expiration periods all the time
isn't this the other way around ??? because shorter expiration time resulting on more issuing cert and therefore make it more prone to downtime
Re: Let's Encrypt had a higher error rate for 90 minutes today
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
No-no, I would rather go back to the good old HTTP/1.1. P.S. JS injection into TCP packets and other meddling with passthrough data should be banned legally, not technically via encryption.
I wish you good luck in court trying to get compensation for the damage you've got through a JS injection attack. Because people prefer to lock their valuables instead of constantly having to identify and sue thieves.
Re: Let's Encrypt had a higher error rate for 90 minutes today
#100What are the viable alternatives to LE? And in case none exists, what does it take to build one? Requirements: free, available to everyone, automation friendly, issues certificates that are actually considered trustworthy by other parties.
> What are the viable alternatives to LE? None. Big tech intentionally made Let's Encrypt a single point of giant failure. > And in case none exists, what does it take to build one? A new Internet and Web standards stack. The whole problem is self-imposed -- we could have published self-signed Ed25519 keys on the DNS instead, and the result would be more secure than whatever it is we have now.
Let's Encrypt is incredible.