Disappointing to hear considering the limitations of CRLs - is there any intention to go forward with OCSP stapling or is that completely abandoned at this point?
The browser vendors have learned that you have to do it yourself or it won't be done well enough to be useful. So you pull every CRL, do a bunch of compression or other tricks, then give your users that data and now they have working revocation.
When Bob's CA and Kebab Shop breaks their revocation stack, instead of dozens of poor individual users or web site owners confused and calling Bob's outsourced call centre in Pakistan with no sign of a fix, now a Google account exec asks Bob's CTO whether they forgot to say they were getting out of the CA business...
I agree this isn't a desirable outcome, but it might be all we have.
Cool. We already got the internet ossified on TCP + UDP, other L4 protocols just get stuck in firewalls and whatnot. Now we're progressing in ossification of HTTP. <insert expletives here>
To be clear: this OCSP decision seems to be driven directly and only by web/HTTP consumers. Anything else is just not considered.
Let's Encrypt issues X.509 certificates, not "Web PKI certificates".
Let's Encrypt is a CA that is part of the WebPKI.
We follow standards set by the CA/B forum, undergo WebTrust Audits, and are accepted into the root programs run by the browser vendors (Primarily: Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft, and Chrome). That is the WebPKI.
OCSP must-staple: free feature of TLS library, works
plain OCSP: hit & miss, depends on the client software using the TLS library correctly
CRL: no.
… that's the crux of this entire thread.
Let's Encrypt's primary goal is to encrypt the web, and most of our decision making is based on that. It isn't so much about HTTP as it is the ecosystem.
You can use our certificates for any TLS Server use-case. I wouldn't suggest using our certificates for things which aren't TLS servers, though.
(The services are all TLS based. They are just not HTTP based, and CRLs are generally delivered via HTTP. And I'm not going to wrangle a HTTP client into my mail server, or worse, postgres instance. The latter could also work with a local CA, it's primarily SMTP that doesn't.)
(...or I just ignore revocation and cross my fingers it'll never come up...)
> Our new CRL URLs will be disclosed only in CCADB, so that the Apple and Mozilla root programs can consume them without exposing them to potentially large download traffic from the rest of the internet at large.