ACME Support in Apache HTTP Server Project
letsencrypt.org
letsencrypt.org
"...you have to manually restart httpd for any certificate changes to take effect."
It's easy enough to have a daily cronjob that just reloads Apache unconditionally, but that feels dirty.
I personally have a cron script set up on my domain gateway to update certificates once a month and reload nginx, at the end. Total unavailability is about .5 sec once a month.
Thanks for asking, because now I know. I was just assuming the same lag I see in the CLI.
And if you think it's too big to fail, I encourage you to start your own ACME-compatible sister CA to Let's Encrypt. And if you're now realizing you don't have the resources to do that, you just answered your own questions (but you can still donate to the EFF or to Let's Encrypt directly: https://letsencrypt.org/donate/)
But you're right about trying to run another public LetsEncrypt style CA. Getting your root cert signed and into browsers is a major undertaking and I'm really glad we have LetsEncrypt. We might be tied to one big provider, but everything they've done is open if other people want to attempt it.
Additionally, other impact-focused people (non-profits, etc.), who would otherwise be willing to make a free CA, probably think Let's Encrypt is doing good enough, so why waste valuable time making the same thing when you could focus on having an impact elsewhere?
I suspect this is a pretty common end result in public-good tasks that don't have business models. They naturally grow to be too big to fail. Some governments try to solve this by just absorbing the task and making it a part of the government's responsibilities. I doubt this would happen for Let's Encrypt, so I guess we'll be stuck with a too-big-to-fail non-profit until it fails, starts to suck too much, gets absorbed by the government, or someone figures out a business model.
There no reason they can't charge money for certificates issued through it, or in fact use it for EV certificates (after a separate initial verification process).
Is the market size of people who would like to automate certificate renewal but want to use a commercial CA zero?
There are a couple of reasons why none are available today. First, ACME isn't quite standardized yet. Let's Encrypt currently implements an older draft and will start offering an ACME server running what will become the RFC version of ACME early next year. It makes sense for other CAs to wait for the standardization process to finish (hopefully while working on their own implementation and giving feedback!) rather than implement the draft currently supported by Let's Encrypt and all clients, and then migrating to an incompatible new version soon after. Going live with a server supporting the latest draft wouldn't make much sense either since clients wouldn't work with it.
Another reason is that the later drafts saw a couple of additions and changes that are relevant for commercial CAs, for example things like the ability to bind ACME accounts to existing CA accounts and around the way out-of-band processes are handled (payments, validation steps that cannot or must not be automated). This was done based on the feedback from a small number of commercial CAs that were active in the working group and should hopefully make ACME a viable option for many others.
Thanks - this is exactly the type of summary I was looking for.
First, because certificate issuance is automated, if Let's Encrypt ever had to migrate to a new root cert they could do so in a way that's almost completely transparent to its clients. Aside from sites that have the old roots pinned, Let's Encrypt could simply start signing new certs with a different root and everyone could just carry on like nothing happened.
Second, because of the low validity period on Let's Encrypt certs, if such a transition did become necessary the entire process could be completed in ~90 days. This is in contrast to other "too big to fail" CAs (e.g. Symantec), where the process of distrusting the old roots takes years.
These factors don't eliminate the concern entirely, of course, but they do make the overall situation much better.
I wonder which will be next? IIS? Nginx?
Unfortunately, it seems to be very dead.
https://weblog.west-wind.com/posts/2016/feb/22/using-lets-en...
I personally don't want Apache loading mod_ssl (or this module either) when I'm not using it. With things like nginx, caddy, etc you have to recompile to remove that part, if it's even possible.
> Caddy is the only server, even in the face of mod_md, to have fully automatic HTTPS by default
In every discussion about Caddy I've seen, the same argument is made. Even when caddy would refuse to start (with valid certificates cached!) during the LE outage, the response was "but we do LE + TLS automatically".
I still don't understand the concept of Caddy. The project seems inherently aimed at hobbyist's at best based on the idea that "its too hard to enable TLS in $Competition", but similarly they provide literally zero support for actually running Caddy - no sysvinit script, no systemd unit file, NOTHING.
So tell me again who their target market is? People who can't enable TLS in <Apache/HAProxy/Hitch/Nginx> but can write a fucking unit file for systemd?
However, I stand by the basic point I was making: the process to get caddy running is not just "apt install caddy-server", and it works.
It's quite possible you could spend more time getting caddy working from a download than you would enabling Certbot + TLS in a competing web server.
- Traefik has cross-platform, highly dynamic proxying
- Apache has such widespread use and market saturation
- Caddy is the only server, even in the face of mod_md, to have fully automatic HTTPS by default
The thread you linked to has nothing to do with any of this, except that it links to this comment by myself, which preempts your claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15433788
Traefik cross-platform? All others are. Highly dynamic. What does that even mean? All are "dynamic".
Apache has widespread use and market saturation... how's that the single advantage it has? It's been evolving a lot.
Caddy is the only server to have fully automatic HTTPS? How much longer mod_md get that?
I think you've missed all of my single point and kind of confirm my fears.
The link which I posted has everything to do with this discussion. It's about Caddy thinking a bad business plan will work because "caddy is the only server to have fully automatic HTTPS by default".
Last question, is Caddy thinking of hiring a CEO or sales person? I think it should.
Not true - (stable) mod_md builds are not yet available for all platforms.
> how's that the single advantage it has?
Where did I say it was the "single advantage"?
> Caddy is the only server to have fully automatic HTTPS? How much longer mod_md get that?
You forgot "by default" -- and probably never, not on Apache's main release tree. Or at least not for a long time.
> I think you've missed all of my single point and kind of confirm my fears.
Why are you afraid? What are you afraid of? This is literally the epitome of spreading FUD.
Do you have reason to believe they won't be? Are you betting your business on the failure of Apache to do basic release engineering?
> Where did I say it was the "single advantage"?
That's fair. Because you listed it then I think that's the "major" advantage. Is that right?
> ou forgot "by default" -- and probably never, not on Apache's main release tree. Or at least not for a long time.
Why? Let's Encrypt and HTTPS by default being something that a lot of people want, why do you think Apache will ignore that and not include mod_md in Apache "for a long time"?
Competition is good. I don't have major reasons to be afraid but I would like Caddy/Traefik and others to succeed. From the very basic mistakes they're making in coming up with a business plan, I don't think they will. And no, being open source alone is not reason enough to ensure project survival.
If you re-read your own comment, I think you're the one spreading FUD about those other projects (and their implied inability to outpace Caddy).
Keep in mind that caddy is not only https by default, it's HTTP/2 by default as well. How long until that is by default in Apache?
And I don't think those are even the killer features of Caddy. They are the things that drive people in, but the real killer feature is how easy it is to configure.
As a bonus, you can have zero downtime renewals and use the TLS-SNI challenge, rather than relying on the "it's probably safe but it still feels wrong" http challenge.
(I don't use caddy, but I always saw the "HTTPS by default" thing more as a nice thing to have, but not hugely important given that you can have the same with external scripts in apache or nginx. But being memsafe is the real distinguisher and one that certainly isn't reachable with a pull req in apache or nginx.)
The URL RFCs specifically say that a DNS name in a URL can be written relatively, or absolutely with the root zone.
These are valid URLs: https://google.com/ and https://google.com./ As you notice, both work fine. Same with every major site, and every major webserver.
Now, you’ll notice that https://caddyserver.com/ works, but https://caddyserver.com./ doesn’t. Caddy, the server, doesn’t support it, but you have to enter every domain twice manually. And caddy, the website, doesn’t support it either.
This was closed as a WONTFIX, despite every implementation of a webserver except for traefik and caddy doing it the same way.
I last tried this a few years back (probably around 2011). I found that a substantial fraction of major sites did not support it, and a substantial fraction of those that seemed to support it produced web pages that were at least partially broken.
Mostly because nowadays every CDN, nginx, Apache2, IIS and HAProxy all support it by default.
But did all of them function correctly? Assertions about the host are very common. Many things operate by domain whitelists, and so things like font loaders and analytics will commonly not work. Cross-origin resource loading will often break, if `*` is not used.
(Most of the things that I expect to break are unimportant, but there will still be a non-trivial number of important breakages.)
I have to admit it's technically a benefit, but if you have a search path that resolves FQDNs as relative domains, isn't half of your software broken anyway? I can't say I've ever seen a FQDN with a dot at the end on any hardcoded or default value.
That’s correct, but it shouldn’t be that way.
I should be able to have google.com resolve to google.com.local.kuschku.de in my resolver, without issue, and the actual website should use google.com.
The fact that we don’t do that today breaks many parts of the original DNS and URL RFCs.
I bet some software implicitly uses absolute domains. URLs are just specified not to work like that.
So if you aren't paying attention you may get blind-sided by any future change, particularly if your use case is weird e.g. you can only pass http-01 by HTTP 301 redirecting to a machine with a completely different hostname, works today, could get outlawed as dangerous one day and they'd have the records to show you're going to be affected, but no way to automatically warn you.
> There are 2 additional settings that are necessary for a Managed Domain: ServerAdmin and MDCertificateAgreement. The mail address of ServerAdmin is used to register at the CA (Let's Encrypt by default). The CA may use it to notify you about changes in its service or status of your certificates.
[1]: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/mod/mod_md.html#managedd...
(This is of course, fantastic news and great to see it'll be even easier for non-technical people to use HTTPS with little effort)
Is ACME an Internet standard yet?
Is that turning into monoculture?
As far as I know there's only one serious server-side implementation right now, and that's Let's Encrypt's open-source Boulder project: https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder
ACME is at Working Group Last Call. Which means the IETF Working Group (people who thought this was interesting/ important) thinks it's finished but await feedback from outsiders who might not have realised this was coming or are too busy to look at in-progress designs. It will be published as a Standards Track RFC making it an "Internet Standard" in due course.
A monoculture is at least an improvement over the Wild West we had prior to the Ten Blessed Methods. As recently as last year any CA could decide (on its own recognizance) that any method it chose was adequate to verify Domain Control, under a heading "Any Other Method" in the Baseline Requirements. If your CA was happy with a method so dumb nobody should possibly have used it, we'd have to find out about that, explain why it's dumb, and then you'd get told to stop doing it, often taking several weeks to achieve. A list of just ten explicit methods was written, the Ten Blessed Methods, and now CAs must use one or more of those. ACME implements three today, and is designed to be extensible. Some methods involve things like human lawyers writing physical letters, it is unlikely ACME will embrace that sort of manual process directly, but methods involving email or the WHOIS system could end up in there.