Let's not Encrypt

> what to do about it

> Not this time. The technical problems are easy to solve. For decades, users of SSH have had a system (save the certificate permanently the first time you connect, and warn if it ever changes) that is optimal in a sense

It's a fundamental problem, not easy to solve. And the Letsencrypt strategy already does things the SSH way: trust blindly on the first time (thus being vulnerable to MITM), and if you were not MITM'd the first time, then you're pretty safe during future connections.

Certbot just automates the "trust blindly" part because configuring a web server cert is a little more complicated than an invocation of ssh.

In fact, if we really did things the SSH way, it would be each user blindly trusting each website for the first visit.

The web is intrinsically a patch job, continually worsening year after year. Encryption solves more than just a MiTM attack, and I always thought it was to avoid snooping from bad actors, but realistically, if a bad actor is in a position where they can MiTM, you are fucked. Network snooping is largely eliminated however thanks to the way that public key encryption (aka what SSL is) works. The entirety of the web relies of the security of the few for the security of the many, and there's nothing you can do about it, and if you dont like it, that's a shame, nothing is going to compel google or microsoft to change anything.

> Update 2023-11-05 Yeah, I've got an LE cert now. And I don't want to talk about it.

You can still get paid certs, but the max validity period is shrinking, to 45 days in 2027 https://blog.nameshield.com/blog/2024/10/17/ssl-tls-certific...