For me the last big one is longer-lasting certificates. I'd like a three-year cert like letsencrypt.org uses for their site, instead of the 90-day ones they offer.

I much prefer the CA industry practice of, put a meta tag on your frontpage, or add a string to a DNS TXT record, and then download a certificate, then you're done for three years. I understand their security claims (which apparently don't apply to letsencrypt.org), but all CAs offer 2-3 year certs, so it's a feature they have that LE lacks.

certbot raises complexities if you're using a managed hosting solution that doesn't have shell access, or the owner of your machine doesn't want you running code on their box, or you have a weird custom web server setup or something.

But all the same, I'm not sure that avoiding certbot is worth continuing to pay $40 a year for my wildcard certificate from AlphaSSL. I may switch when mine expires.

What I'm even more hopeful for is that prices of wildcard certs from other vendors will drop now that there's a free alternative. I'm super excited that LE are finally offering these for free!

I don't recommend using certbot directly; I use and recommend acme-tiny (https://github.com/diafygi/acme-tiny), which is quite simple, and doesn't require as many permissions. I keep it isolated under its own user, run it to renew a certificate, and don't give it access to my TLS private key (just my LE account key and a directory mapped to .well-known/acme-challenge in my web server).

If you have a host that doesn't have shell access, it wouldn't be that hard to modify a script like that to copy files up to .well-known/acme-challenge, and copy the TLS key in place when done.

> I'd like a three-year cert like letsencrypt.org uses for their site, instead of the 90-day ones they offer.

Why? The whole point of LE is to be able to automate renewals and if you automate it then the length of validity makes zero difference.

Then why doesn't letsencrypt.org eat their own dogfood, rather than have a 3 year certificate?

At a guess, I'd say the reason is because Let's Encrypt (the service) didn't exist when they got their certificate.

From Wikipedia:

> Let's Encrypt is a certificate authority that launched on April 12, 2016

From Let's Encrypt's certificate

> Period of Validity > Begins On: 2015/2/4

I agree they should eat their own dogfood, but in the meantime, I'm eating their dogfood and it tastes pretty good.

Just in case you are not aware, Let's Encrypt does support the DNS TXT method as well.

I use the acme.sh client (https://github.com/Neilpang/acme.sh) for updating certs for a site on a managed platform, using the DNS verification method.

+1 on this. An until nginx gets LE baked into it, building docker images is kind of tricky since there is a circular dependency. I'm actually willing to pay letsencrypt 60$ for a wildcard 3 year certificate.

There is a Lua module which will do LetsEncrypt automatically for any domain in an nginx instance.

>For me the last big one is longer-lasting certificates. I'd like a three-year cert like

Long term I would be concerned that browsers, such as Chrome, may stop supporting certs that last too long. We are already seeing this behavior with Symantec after some security issues with issuing certs. I expect in the long run certs that last over a year will be done away with.

I agree that free LE certs disrupt the TLS certificate market pricing and a lot of CAs are probably going to be out of business for that matter.

I think the market for TLS CA will segment into basically two things:

a) free letsencrypt certificates for everything that only needs to be domain-validated (DV SSL).

b) $95/year EV certificates for companies that want the big friendly green banner on their ecommerce/credit card checkout pages, which is reassuring to the average non techincal user. In the last 4 years I have seen the price for EV SSL certs fall from $400/year to $95/year from several vendors. My main concern is that EV SSL issuers need to be held to a very high standard of actually verifying corporate identity. If they start getting lax about it and known EV certs go out to not-fully-vetted organizations, that would be a bad thing for the whole idea behind EV.

And this is a great thing.

Actually, it's not necessarily a great thing. Issuing certificates cost money and has to be paid one way or another. Having one very dominant CA -- even if it's free -- is not healthy long term. We need competition in this space.

> Issuing certificates cost money and has to be paid one way or another.

It's not clear that the prices being charged by commercial CAs are anywhere close or even related to the underlying costs.

I think LE is beginning to demonstrate that the costs of operating a CA are not actually that high, at the same time that the lax behavior by certain commercial CAs has demonstrated that the "validation" they provide is of very little value.

Most of the cost tied up in being a CA is being audited and reaudited by a third party that charges hundreds of thousands of dollars (and given the Symantec/Startcom shenanigans, is completely worthless).

The actual technical infrastructure required, while intricate, isn't that hard to set up.

I believe that it would be better if all CAs disappeared and a new system such as public-keys-as-urls/hashes-as-urls (like tor/i2p/gnunet/etc) or a web-of-trust based solution was adopted.

> Issuing certificates cost money

Making a post on HN probably costs more money than issuing certificates.

Even if you're not using a proper PKI, you still have to trust someone at the end of the day to not be lying to you. That's ostensibly the point behind CAs and auditing and trust roots.

LE's probably the best we're going to get for a long time. Mozilla's one of the few groups I'd go so far as to say is completely benevolent, and LE is being operated as a public service.

The cost of issuing domain-validated certificates is negligible - there's no reason they couldn't be done for free and paid through advertising or other long-tail revenue sources (or in LetsEncrypt's case: donations and endowment).

If you want to avoid certbot you can just self-sign.

I assume letsencrypt don't use their own certs to avoid a chicken and egg problem if there's ever an issue.

e.g. a software as a service database provider most likely does not use their own software for their database.

Let's Encrypt has supported SAN certificates with up to 100 hostnames ever since they launched.

You are right on the SAN cert, my bad.