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Comment by pedrozieg | Hacker News Reader

It’s easy to forget how awful TLS was before Let’s Encrypt: you’d pay per-hostname, file tickets, manually validate domains, and then babysit a 1-year cert renewal calendar. Today it’s basically “install an ACME client once and forget it” and the web quietly shifted from <30% HTTPS to ~80% globally and ~95% in the US in a few years.

The impressive bit isn’t just the crypto, it’s that they attacked the operational problem: automation (ACME), good client ecosystem, and a nonprofit CA that’s fine with being invisible infrastructure. A boring, free cert became the default.

The next 10 years feel harder: shrinking lifetimes (45-day certs are coming) means “click to install cert” can’t exist anymore, and there’s still a huge long tail of internal dashboards, random appliances, and IoT gear that don’t have good automation hooks. We’ve solved “public websites on Linux boxes,” but not “everything else on the network.”

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Just a few months ago my company was going through some transitions and wanted to get some certs to cover us while we migrated to a different stack with let's encrypt and automated cert renewals.

We had some legacy systems on our network that needed certs and had various subdomains that prevented us from just having a wildcard cert. It ended up that we needed a few dozen subdomains with wildcard certs for each, and it was all for internal traffic between them.

The company we were using wanted to charge us $30,000 for a one year cert with that many wildcards.

We said fuck that, created our own CA, generated a big wildcard cert, and then installed the CA on the few thousand servers as a trusted root. A few months later and we are just using let's encrypt for everything, for free.

I can't believe there is a market for $30,000 certs anymore. We were just shocked that that was deemed a reasonable price to charge us.

I think the best analogy for this are scams. Once a scammer finds a mark they'll pay, there's a desire to soak them for as much as they'll bear.

EVs are not a scam per-se, but they also don't add any value. 80% of the world already figured that out, do by definition if you are asking you are in the bottom 20%.

Now I get you were in the process of migration, but that's an edge case. In a normal case if you go around asking to buy a wildcard EV, you basically have a sign saying "fleece me".

So yeah, there's still a market for people wanting to throw money at CAs, even in these comments you'll see some. And management types are especially prone to "sounds expensive, must be good" logic when spending other people's money.

I think you've left out the ecosystem of semi-scam, without that the decisions look less logical.. If you go and add a private rootCA to all your servers there are risks. You can convince yourself the risks are covered, you can convince a highly qualified security analyst. Can you convince a business intern with a checklist hired by a certification firm that underbid the one with specialists? 30K to engage with no one on the topic starts to look ideal.

I'm not sure the alternative is sef-created RootCA. (But perhaps I don't understand the underlying case.)

To me, the alternative is just a LE cert. Can do wildcards via DNS challenge.

I was replying in the context of what you were replying to where they either could spend 30k or make a private root. I'm not sure they were actually using EV but for it to cost $30k and given the topic of the thread it seems plausible they were using some technicality on EV or similar to reduce public domain validation requirements.

> It’s easy to forget how awful TLS was before Let’s Encrypt: you’d pay per-hostname, file tickets, manually validate domains, and then babysit a 1-year cert renewal calendar.

I remember getting a 10(I think?) year wildcard cert in ~2009. I get why that changed and, while it's not great for my personal usage, I see the value for the majority of the web, but the story definitely looked more like "we decided to make TLS so difficult you have no choice but to automate" when it came time to finally replace it.

If there were two things which would make me happier with it all it'd be 10x rate limits on Let's Encrypt (so you don't have to even think of it when you screw something up/test different things for a week) and some more extension/standardisation of ACME on an internal facing service talking with an external DNS server to do the DNS challenge more easily in this scenario.

Both Let's Encrypt and 3-year certificates were introduced in 2015. We had 5+ year certificates before that. At the time you'd buy the longest certificate possible and forget about it--that's what I did. In 2013 I bought a 5-year certificate (self-service, no tickets) and didn't think about it again until 2018.

My experience was: get 3-year certificate for free, install it and forget about it. With LetsEncrypt, it's always pain, expired websites everywhere. Too bad that american IT mafia put these good CA out of business.

I was about to say that I never encounter TLS errors while browsing, but that's not strictly true. There is one such website, and it's only because the webmaster had a stroke and can't maintain it currently. But apart from that rather sad story I can't relate to your issues at all.

I agree. I don't remember the last time I saw an expired cert, and it was probably an abandoned web site (which would eventually expire even with a 3-year certificate as well). At least with Let's Encrypt you have to automate it.

American IT Mafia? That provides free certificates? You'd think setting up renewal would be less of a hassle than dealing and paying CAs even if it's once every 3 years, so that would be a rather benevolent mafia. Which of those CAs went out of business by the way?

Do you think Let's encrypt is less popular outside the US?

StartSSL, WoSign were the ones I've used. Very convenient services, much more convenient, compared to this certbot insanity.

I think that the rest of the world does not have much choice, because US uses their IT superiority to force political decisions to the rest of the world. I experienced that first-hand. When my country wanted to implement MITM to improve Internet usability for their citizens, US companies blacklisted government root certificate which disrupted this scheme and forced my country to roll back this plan. Now I have lots of websites completely blocked, instead of more careful and precise per-page blocking that would only be possible with MITM.

Hopefully, over time, China and Russia will destroy this superiority and will provide viable alternatives.

I had to deal with StartCom once many years ago, before LetsEncrypt. They had the rudest customer service I think I've ever encountered.

In what way do MITM certificates "improve Internet usability for their citizens"?

I just explained that. Basically government wants to block some specific webpage, say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nursultan_Nazarbayev. Without MITM, they'll end up with blocking the entire en.wikipedia.org domain, so citizens will lose access to a lot of information. With MITM, they'll be able to target precisely one page and I can read any other wikipedia article without issues.

And with MITM they can read literally all of your private internet traffic… That seems like a significantly worse tradeoff to just using a VPN to browse Wikipedia.

Literally all you have to do is configure a cronjob to renew the cert?

I've got a website I build for a friend running that I haven't touched in 5 years TLS-wise, never had any issues.

For public websites most probably don't even need to touch cron as Apache/Caddy/NGINX/Traefik have built-in options these days. The only time I run something like a cron task is for certain internal IoT type certs.

For IoT myself i'm wondering if it's something that could be thrown into the Matter side of things, make the hub/border router act as an ACME server with it's own CA that gives out mTLS certs so the devices can validate the hub and the hub can validate the devices. It'd never be implemented properly by the swarms of cheap hardware out there but I can dream...

But why?

There's no reliable source of truth for your home network. Neither the local (m)DNS nor the IP addresses nor the MAC addresses hold any extrinsic meaning. You could certainly run the standard ACME challenges, but neither success nor failure would carry much weight.

And then the devices themselves have no way of knowing your hub/router/AP is legitimate. You'd have to have some way of getting the CA certificate on to them that couldn't be easily spoofed.

EDIT: There is a draft for a new ACME challenge called dns-persist-01, which mentions IoT, but I'm not really sure how it helps that use case exactly: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-acme-dns-pe...

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