LE isn't the only free ACME provider, you can get your certs from ZeroSSL, SSL.com, Google or Actalis if you want, or even use several of them for redundancy. If you use Caddy that's even the default behavior - it tries ZeroSSL first and automatically falls back to Let's Encrypt if that fails for whatever reason.

Oh, on LE the Rate Limit Adjustment Request forms the contractual things (if that's what they are?) do not load: https://isrg.formstack.com/forms/rate_limit_adjustment_reque...

ZeroSSL, SSL.com and Actalis offer paid services on top of their basic free certificates.

Google is Google.

So your "free" ssl certs are provided by surveillance capitalism, and paid for with your privacy (and probably your website user's privacy too)?

A more realistic concern with using Googles public CA is they may eventually get bored and shut it down, as they tend to do. It would be prudent to have a backup CA lined up.

I'm not sure that's technically true. As a CA they definitely have the power to facilitate a MitM attack. They can also issue fraudulent certificates.

> AIUI the ACME protocol never lets the CA see the private key, only the public key, which is public by definition anyway.

That has more to do with HTTPS end to end encryption, not the protocol of issuance.

That's not really how ssl certs work - google isn't getting any information they wouldn't have otherwise had by issuing the ssl cert.

No, that's false. It's the other way around.

“If Caddy cannot get a certificate from Let's Encrypt, it will try with ZeroSSL”. Source: https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https#issuer-fallback

Which makes sense, since the ACME access to ZeroSSL must go through an account created by a manual registration step. Unless the landscape changed very recently, LE is still the only free ACME that does not require registration. Source: https://poshac.me/docs/v4/Guides/ACME-CA-Comparison/#acme-ca...

https://caddy.community/t/using-zerossls-acme-endpoint/9406

Correction: the default behavior is to use Let's Encrypt alone, but if you provide an email then it's Let's Encrypt with fallback to ZeroSSL.

Ideally, this will take less ongoing labor than annual manual rotations, and I'd argue sites that can't handle this would have been likely to break at the next annual rotation anyways.

If they have certificates managed by hosters, the hosters will deal with it. If they don't, then someone was already paying for the renewal and handling the replacement on the server side, making it much more likely that it will be fixed.

Nobody's paying for EV certificates now browsers don't display the EV details. The only reason to pay for a certificate is if you're rotating certificates manually, and the 90 day expiry of Lets Encrypt certificates is a hassle.

If the CA/Browser Forum is forcing everyone to run ACME clients (or outsource to a managed provider like AWS or Cloudflare) doesn't that eliminate the last substantial reason to give money to a CA?

Seems to me CAs have intermediate certificates and can rotate those, not much upside to rotating the root certificates, and lots of downsides.

1. These might need to happen as emergencies if something bad happens

2. If roots rotate often then we build the muscle of making sure trust bundles can be updated

I think the weird amount they are being rotated today is the real root cause if broken devices and we need to stop the bleed at some point.

Five years is not enough incentive to push this change. A TV manufacturer can simply shrug and claim that the device is not under warranty anymore. We'll only end up with more bricked devices.

Isn't this the whole point of intermediate certificates, though?

You know, all the CA's online systems only having an intermediate certificate (and even then, keeping it in a HSM) and the CA's root only being used for 20 seconds or so every year to update the intermediate certificates? And the rest of the time being locked up safer than Fort Knox?

Those are weaknesses. It’s also that a root rotation might be needed for completely stupid vulnerabilities. Like years later finding that specific key was generated incorrectly.

If the vendor is really unable to update, then it's at best negligence when designing the product, and at worst -- planned obsolescence.

Nothing stays the same forever, software is never done. It’s absurd pretend otherwise.

2. Product is a smart fridge or whatever, reasonable users might keep it offline for 5+ years.

3. New homeowner connects it to the internet.

4. Security update fails because the security update server's SSL cert isn't signed by a trusted root.

We do car recalls all the time. Just send out an email or something with instructions of what to put on a USB, it's basically the same thing.

Yes it's inconvenient for consumers and annoying but the alternative is worse. Essentially hard coding certificates was always a bad idea.

The CA folks and the Browser folks may have had differences of opinions.

Microsoft voted for it, and now they are basically the only game in town for cloud signing that is affordable for individuals. The Forum needs voting representatives for software developers and end users or else the members will just keep enriching themselves at our expense.

They set the baseline standard for code signing certificates. In 2020 they added the requirement to use hardware modules which resulted in much higher prices and fewer small developers opting to sign their code.

I expect they will introduce new, "more secure", proprietary methods, and ride the vendor lock-in until the paid certificate industries death.

Large companies will keep on using paid providers also for business continuity in case free provider will fail. Also I don’t know what kind of SLA you have on let’s encrypt.

It is more complicated than „oh it is free let’s move on”.

> Next year, you’ll be able to opt-in to 45 day certificates for early adopters and testing via the tlsserver profile. In 2027, we’ll lower the default certificate lifetime to 64 days, and then to 45 in 2028.

If paid certs drop in max validity period, then yeah, zero reason to burn money for no reason.

Whole IT teams are just going to wash their hands of this and punt to a provider or their cloud IaaS.

We're doing a beta of it for some other groups now. https://www.certkit.io/

I want Apache to do this natively.

I want nginx to do this natively.

I want tomcat to do this natively.

I want express to do this natively.

Every single http server punts on TLS as an afterthought of supply me your private and public key and I’ll do it. Sure there are modules now for those servers for ACME but this process is still old school Web 1.0 deployment logic.

All of these required, complex, constantly moving components mean we're beholden to larger tech companies and can't do things by ourselves anymore without increasing effort. It also makes it easier for central government to start revoking access once they put a thumb on cert issuance. Parties that the powers don't like can be pruned through cert revocation. In the future issuance may be limited to parties with state IDs.

And because mainstream tech is now incompatible with any other distribution method, you suddenly lose the ability to broadcast ideas if you fall out of compliance. The levers of 1984.

You think that’s base64 you’re reading? Hmm. :)

PRISM works fine to recover HTTPS-protected communications. If anything NSA would be happier if every site they could use PRISM on used HTTPS, that's simply in keeping with NOBUS principles.

Source:

They collect it straight from the company after it's already been transmitted. It's not a wiretap, it's more akin to an automated subpoena enforcement.

That’s just what the public knows. It goes far beyond that.

Most of the good projects in DoD space have Star Wars names. BESPIN, JEDI, etc. PRISM is a mechanism, one aspect of a much larger machine.

But that is what ISPs did! Injecting (more) ads. Replaced ads with their own. Injecting Javascript for all sorts of things. Like loading a more compressed version of a JPEG and you had to click on a extra button to load the full thing. Removing the STARTTLS string from a SMTP connection. Early UMTS/G3 Vodafone was especially horrendous.

I also remember "art" projects where you could change the DNS of a public/school PC and it would change news stories on spiegel.de and the likes.

Of course I have modern laptops, but I still fire up my old Pismo PowerMac G3 occasionally to make sure my sites are still working on HTTP, accessible to old hardware, and rendering tolerably on old browsers.

The problem is not "your part", it's the "between you and the client" part.

It becomes trivial to inject extra content, malicious JavaScript, adverts etc into the flow. And this isn't "targetted" at your site, its simply applied to all insecure sites.

TLS is not about restricting your ability to broadcast information. It's about preserving your ability to guarentee that your reader reads what you wrote.

TLS is free and easy to implement. The only reason not to do it is laziness. You may see TLS as a violation of your principles- but I see it as an attitude of "I don't care about my readers safety - let someone inject malicious JavaScript (or worse) on my page, their security is not my problem".

(If the govt want to censor you they can do that via dns).

The analogous problem would be letters opened and anthrax inserted. That doesn't (often) happen because mail is physical and hard to do at scale. (And the anthrax cant mine bitcoin.)

Given the ineffectiveness of current laws around ransomware, bonnets, phishing, identity theft, online scams etc, I don't think a law saying "don't do that" would be a solution.

And ISPs are (by far) not the only offenders here. Every public wifi would be an equally attractive attack point.

Unfortunately, the people making these decisions simply do not care how they impact actual real world users. It happens over and over that browser makers dictate something that makes sense in a nice, pure theoretical context, but sucks ass for everyone stuck in the real world with all its complexities and shortcomings.

Google calls the shots and the others fall in line.

There are lots of organizations that support the ACME protocol. LE is the most well known, but there are others, and more on the way.

Existing CAs don't necessarily vanish with this change. They are free to implement ACME (or some proprietary protocol) and they are completely free to keep charging for certificates if they like.

The real result of this change is that processes will change (where they haven't already) improving both customer experience and security.

But to be clear there's no "one organization" in the loop here. You can rest easy on that front.

This is not centralizing everything to Let's Encrypt. it's forcing everyone to use ACME, and many CAs support ACME (and those that don't probably will soon due to this change).

The vote was more about whether the CAB would continue to be relevant. "Accept the reality, or browsers aren't even going to show up anymore".

I wrote a bunch about this recently: https://www.certkit.io/blog/47-day-certificate-ultimatum

I do still feel that "that blog/publication that had immense cultural impact years ago, that was acquired/put on life support with annual certificate updates, will now be taken offline rather than migrated to a system that can support ACME automations, because the consultants charge more than the ad revenue" will be an unfortunate class of casualty. But that's progress, I suppose.

Today, people are complaining that automation of certificate renewals are annoying (I'm sure they were). Before that, the complaint was that random US companies were simply buying and deploying their own root certificates, issuing certs for arbitrary strangers domains, so their IT teams wouldn't have to update their desktop configurations.

Things are better now.

The difference being that there's at least a little bit of popular dissatisfaction with the status quo of browsers unilaterally dictating web standards, whereas no one came to the defense of CAs, since everybody hated them. A useful lesson that you need to do reputation management even if you're running a successful racket, since if people hate you enough they might not stick up for you even if someone comes for you "illegally".

The CA industry is the new taxi industry.

Which AI did you use for writing it? It's pretty good.

- What is the problem with stale certificates if a domain changes hands? It seems to me that whether they renew the certificate or not, the security situation for the user is still the same, no?

- Is CertKit a similar solution to Anchor Relay? (https://anchor.dev/relay)

The previous owners have valid certificates for up to 398 days. If they are a malicious party cable of doing a man-in-the-middle attack, they can present a valid certificate and fully impersonate the owner. For example, when Stripe started, they purchased the domain from another party, who had a valid stripe.com payment certificate for nearly a year. (https://www.certkit.io/blog/bygonessl-and-the-certificate-th...)

> Is CertKit a similar solution to Anchor Relay?

I hadn't heard about anchor relay before, thanks for the link!

CertKit is similar, but broader. Anchor says it sits between your ACME clients and the CA and simplifies the validation steps, which is super useful. But you still have to run ACME clients and have a bunch of automation logic running on your end.

CertKit IS the ACME client. You CNAME the challenge record to us and we do all the communication with the CAs and store/renew/revoke your certificates centrally. Your systems can pull (or be pushed) the certs they need via our API, then we monitor the HTTPS endpoints to make sure the correct cert is running. Its a fully-audited centralized certificate management.

"Did not vote", and "not responsible", is definitely a take...

They could call their bluff. I would. The CA/browser forum made a mistake here. And they can only get away with it if the players involved comply.

Browers have an incentive to increase the complexity, good engineers would resist that.

This is just fear-mongering, legacy sites still need to update their tech and going fully automatic for cert renewals leads to less maintenance burden then renewing them manually.