If it begins to enshitify, someone will quickly take up the helm. It’s become so core now that someone like Cloudflare would just be like “We do this now.”
Comment on Let's Encrypt is 10 years old today !
RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Let’s Encrypt is amazing, but are there any equally trustworthy alternatives people could switch to if something bad happens to it?
fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 2 days ago
CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Cloudflare sort of provides this now by being a MITM to secure your site between your server and the end user. But this requires you and your end user to trust Cloudflare.
And fwiw the ACME protocol is open so anyone can implement it. I believe even the ACME software that EFF sends out allows you to choose your server with some configuration.
horse_tranquilizers@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Cloudfare means no click from me (TBH after I clicked)
dan@upvote.au 1 day ago
I think Cloudflare enshittifying is a bigger risk that Let’s Encrypt.
Laser@feddit.org 2 days ago
Maybe ZeroSSL
Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
They don’t offer wildcard certs, but otherwise I think they are.
I wanna say acme.sh defaults to them.Laser@feddit.org 2 days ago
Never used them, but they state at zerossl.com/features/acme/ that their free acme certs include wildcards.
Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Yes, seems you are right. Not sure where I got the impression.
Unrelated, when I researched this I saw that acme.sh, zerossl, and a bunch of other acme clients are owned by the same entity, “Stack Holdings”/“apilayer.com”. According to this, zerossl also has some limitations over letsencrypt in account requirements and limits on free certificates.
By using ZeroSSL’s ACME feature, you will be able to generate an unlimited amount of 90-day SSL certificates at no charge, also supporting multi-domain certificates and wildcards. Each certificate you create will be stored in your ZeroSSL account.
It is suspicious that they impose so many restrictions then wave most on the acme api, where they presumably could not compete otherwise. On their gui they allow only 3 certificates and don’t allow multi-domain at all. Then even in the acme client they somehow push an account into the process.
[…] for using our ACME service you have to create and use EAB (External Account Binding) credentials within your ZeroSSL dashboard.
EAB credentials are limited to a maximum per user/per day. [This might be for creating them, not uses per credential, unsure how to interpret this.]
This all does make me slightly worry this block around apilayer.com will fall before letsencrypt does.
Other than letsencrypt and zerossl, this page also lists no other full equivalents for what letsencrypt does.
dan@upvote.au 1 day ago
ZeroSSL, plus a few paid companies support ACME (I know Sectigo and GoDaddy do). Sure, the latter are paid services, but in theory you can switch to them and use the exact same setup you’re currently using with Let’s Encrypt.
treadful@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
They came up with the ACME protocol, so presumably somebody could. The real barrier to entry is the cost of getting into that certificate chain of trust. I have no idea why it’s so difficult and expensive.
xthexder@l.sw0.com 2 days ago
Well, it’s difficult, as it should be, because if you control a certificate in the active chain of trust of browsers, you can hack pretty much anything you want.
treadful@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the CA only signing your public key to prove identity/authority? I don’t think the CA can magically MITM every cert they sign.
The impact is serious enough to warrant a $1m entry fee, IMO. At best, someone could impersonate a site. They’d also have to get other things in line (e.g. DNS hijacking) to be at all successful anyway. And it’s not like most people are authenticating certs themselves. They just trust browsers to trust CAs that vouch for you and prevents those scary browser warnings.
It doesn’t improve encryption compared to a self-signed cert though.
xthexder@l.sw0.com 2 days ago
If you are the CA, you can sign a new certificate yourself for google.com and the browser will accept it. It’s effectively MITM for any certificate. The browser has no way of knowing there’s 2 “valid” certs at once, and in fact that is allowed regardless (multiple servers with different instances of the SSL cert is very common now)