Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

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And yet, I am a bit worried that now, most of the web depends on LetsEncrypt. That's a single point of failure. Sure, they are "good guys", really, but remember that Google used to be "good guys" too. And this is a US-based organization, dependent on US rules, which is not so bad, but alternatives would be nice.

And yes, there are alternatives, but everything is made so that LetsEncrypt is the only reasonable choice.

First, if you are not using https, you get shunned by every major web browser, you don't get the latest features, even those that has nothing to do with encryption (ex: brotli compression), downloads get blocked, etc... So you need https, good thing LetsEncrypt make it so easy, so you use LetsEncrypt.

Because of the way LetsEncrypt verification works, you get short-term certificates, ok, fine. Other CAs do things differently, making it short-term certificates impractical, so your certificates last longer. But now, browsers are changing their requirements to only short-term certificate, but it is not a problem, just switch to LetsEncrypt, and it is free too.

Also, X.509 certificates, which is the basis of https (incl. TLS, HTTP/3, ...) only supports a single signature, so I guess it is LetsEncrypt and nothing else.

There are more ACME-compatible CAs than just Let's Encrypt, should they ever become the bad guys, or if you don't want to trust them for any reason, see [0].

I understand that people get annoyed at shorter cert lifetime, for instance if you are managing appliances or use SSL certs for other reasons than the common use case. But if you just want to serve a website, there are not so many reasons not to use HTTPS today, either on Let's Encrypt or on something else.

[0] https://acmeclients.com/certificate-authorities/

How would you propose things should work instead?

The idea would be the ability for a certificate to accept multiple signatures, making it more of a "web-of-trust" system. So you still have your LetsEncrypt certificate, but maybe augmented by another signature from an similar authority located in another country, or some other reputable organization that has your best interests in mind.

Maybe there are problems with that, but I never really understood the limit of a single signature for certificates. Is it because of bandwidth and performance requirements? Is it really a problem nowadays? especially with ECDSA making public keys much smaller.

Does this solve any problem that isn't solved equally well by just acquiring multiple separate certificates? I guess it would make your service highly available in case of revocation, but unexpected revocations are rare enough that almost everyone is willing to run the risk of a brief outage in case one occurs.

I propose a system like SSH fingerprints.

Then anybody can maintain a database of "known fingerprints", and a web-of-trust can be established without depending on a centeral-point-of-censorship.

Fuck CA's. They're not and never have been trustworthy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcitium#Certificate_hacking

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/06/chrome-boots-2-cert...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-guillotine-falls-on-cer...

How would you propose to overcome the usability problems that have heretofore prevented normal users from adopting web-of-trust?

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