Submitted 2 weeks ago by Sibbo@sopuli.xyz to selfhosted@lemmy.world
I know that I can simply make my own private certificate authority that only I and my family trust. But is there some public provider like letsencrypt that is in a free-er part of the world than the US?
There are some commercial Certificate Authorities that offer free certificates. But in contrast Let’s Encrypt is a non-profit.
commercial
free certificates
How do they make money?
Usually they make money with extended certificates where they not only offer a certificate for example.com but also certify that it belongs to Example Ltd.
Those extended certificates used to show the company name next to address bars, but I don’t think browsers do that anymore.
Also the controlling party in Italy is practically neo-fascist and Austria is also sliding there again with their Nazi party like AfD in Germany and VB in Belgium getting a huge portion of votes.
I don’t see how it is that much better than a US non- profit.
I think the core thing is that you have to know of a bunch of different CA options and switch when necessary or on a compromised CA.
Both Italy and Austria are EU member states , fall under the GDPR AND NIS2 and while both government(even under the FPÖ) have their downsides neither has legislation that is even remotely close to what the US even have today (and had for decades) and unlike the US both countries still have a very well working judical system and the ECJ.
So. Yes. While not perfect, their situation is massively better than a US non for profit. Total different league. Not even in the same ballpark.
The thing is, the US is already fascist.
Also, you know the downfall of Autistici/Inventati - No - check my post history. One of the events that happened is that US owned PIR removed one of the domain names since they own .org. One less US entity, one less point of failure.
ZeroSSL is probably what OP is looking for
I thought zerossl used let’s encrypt behind the scenes (for their free certs at least).
Simi-related fun fact.
The biggest contributor to TOR is the CIA. They funded it’s creation and are primarily responsible for maintaining it to this day.
The CIA maintains TOR as a way for spies to pass information over the internet. They make it public because if only spies used TOR it would be trivial to catch them. So it’s in their interest that it be public and secure. It’s open source and security experts agree you can trust it.
The CIA, not navy intelligence?
The core principle of Tor, known as onion routing, was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, to protect American intelligence communications online.
So since this, according yo you, is a fact, I do suppose you have evidence to this claim? And I’m talking evidence that can be corroborated, not a Facebook post or something from a conspiracy sub, and not “oh man, everybody knows this!” because everybody doesn’t know this.
Crazy that you’re downvoted for asking for sources lol
I thougnt it was the Navy, not CIA itself
Yeah it was the NRL in Annapolis, Maryland
Lost Lemmings?
Let’s encrypt is very transparent and has been designed to be auditable. What are you worried about exactly?
That the U.S. government can arbitrarily take down websites by revoking certificates issued by let’s encrypt? How obvious can it be? I wondered the same thing as OP months ago. We need european alternatives. I think there are some, have some bookmarked somewhere.
Certificate revocation is a joke and has been for over a decade
Still American. de-Americanizing the tech stack is a good idea.
Are you trying to solve a technica, or political/moral problem? Let’s Encrypt doesn’t create, see, store or log your private cerficates. So, even if they are in the US, I don’t see a risk, and otherwise, the other parts you use in general are probably vulnerable to the problem even if non-US.
For ex. the US could simply order browsers stop validating any certificates not issues by US companies in browsers. And whoosh. Having a non-US certificate won’t help much there either.
uncle sam. audit away. until sam says “give me the keys” and then sam has the keys
@flandish @possiblylinux127 Letsencrypt just has the public keys, no private keys. If Letsencrypt gives my public keys to sam, it does not matter, because public keys are public. My private key is under my administration only.
The transparency logs would mean that any rouge certificates created would leave a paper trail not to mention there is nothing stopping them from issuing a certificate for any domain of there choosing
art@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago I think Let’s Encrypt will stay safe for quite a while, but unfortunately because of the political climate we’re in right now, it may not stay safe in the future.
I don’t think anyone is gonna solve that problem until it’s actually a problem.
A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago It is a problem, and there are solutions.
You say. Confidently. With no receipts.
I don’t think anyone’s going to solve the problem in general, to be honest.
Like, Let’s Encrypts goal is super novel, but also expensive as shit to actually run, and requires a lot of coordination because it needs to be a trust authority. If this ever happened, it would probably be at the backing of some government structure, because I don’t see many people wanting to jump at that at an expense.
A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago This is why I never even started using Letsencrypt; looking at the fine print, you actually enter into some kind of contract with some US entity, which I don’t want even if it’s the coolest of all FOSS foundations.
Here’s a site that has some info:
https://www.eurotoolkit.eu/categories/certificate-authority-ca
I have used certum.pl for years and it looks like I might go back to them soon because my VPS provider doesn’t offer bundled certs anymore.
I used to pay €40/year iirc. I suspect it’s gotten more expensive though.
ZeroSSL costs 180 per year for unlimited 90 day certs. I get the independence from US-based services, but I don’t want to drop that kind of money on my toy domains.
A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago I think you misunderstood something there; they’re very explicitely offering free certs.
I think that ZeroSSL are owned by an American company.
A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago Which is in turn owned by a Swedish company.
Can’t speak for OP, but for me it’s important that with e.g. Letsencrypt, I’m entering a contract under US law, and with ZeroSSL it’s under EU/Austrian law.
What risk are you trying to mitigate, specifically?
If it’s the CA taking over your site, control over your CA specifically doesn’t really give any advantage to an attacker (they would have to hijack traffic and provide a new certificate - nobody will notice if the certificate is from a different CA).
Note that your CA cannot decrypt the exchanges between your server and its clients.
It opens the possibility of a man-in-the-middle attack.
which is still there if you are not using lets encrypt, because they can strongarm them to make a fake cert for your domain, and install a proxy repackaging HTTPS traffic with the fake certificate. all browsers trust the lets encrypt root certificate, so they won’t see anything suspicious.
the only thing there today to detect this (but not avoid) is certificate transparency logs. all modern certificates are required to be added to this log, for the CA to remain compliant. but browsers are not checking the logs, that would be a lot of additional traffic and how do they decide if a certificate was created maliciously? also, lets encrypt could afford being noncompliant, browser vendors can’t realistically just distrust their root certificate, many sites would become inaccessible.
The problem is that if that is your threat model, then the VPS provider, ISP, and literally everything between you and letsencrypt can pull a conpromised key fro letsencrypt.
This actually happened btw, an xmpp server was attacked this way, they compromised not the server itself, but the VPS provider MITMed their traffic: www.devever.net/~hl/xmpp-incident
If your threat model involves this, then the only solution is Tor, which eliminates these requirements of trust.
Yep, that’s what I described and any CA accepted by the client can do it
Are you sure they can’t decrypt? They have your certificate after all. Besides, if the Orange has a bad day, he can ban certificates export or just for a single company or individual.
Yes, the private key never leaves your machine.
You send them a certificate signing request with your public key, they put their verification stamp on it and send it to you.
The only part they have to play is verifying that your certificate is trusted by a root certificate.
The CA cannot decypt: they don’t have the secret key which only the server has. When requesting a new certificate from the CA, the server generated a secret key (aka private key) and then generated a derived value that goes into a Certificate Signing Request (CSR). The CSR is what the CA receives, not the secret key, and then the CA returns the certificate file to the server, which has been endorsed by the CA and thus trusted by the user base.
The certificate is only used for authentication. The actual data is encrypted with a temporary symmetric key that is generated via a diffie-hellman exchange
A MITM doesn’t require decrypting. It just requires telling a convincing enough lie to each side of a conversation that they think they’re talking to the other party. Then you end up encrypting to their key which they can just read. That’s different from breaking the encryption.
Are you sure they can’t decrypt?
No, and none of the state actors who do that kind of stuff will ever tell you. Watch The Imitation Game for a good/bad time and some context.
If you had a break for the modern crypto schemes and published it right now you would shut down all digital commerce, a lot of the spy traffic if not most of it^1^, and nothing could be started back up again until everything was redone from scratch. Best hope would be that the post quantum algorithms^2^ the cryptographers have aren’t succeptible to whatever you did to break the existing algorithms. It’d take a bit to get the software implementations and keys in place, etc. The hardware stuff would take longer.
They don’t have your private key
@Sibbo I do not see any problem with Letsencrypt. Any CA which is widely trusted has to follow the same rules. This rules are set up by the CA Browser Forum. Which metadata does LE collect? My server's IP address, domain and subdomain, mail address. These are logged in the CT logs. Every CA has to log all certificates in a public CT log. Regardless which CA I choose, these data are public. There are not any critical data or metadata that LE can collect.
Letsencrypt can be directly forced to revoke certificates by the US. Organisations outside of the US are less vulnerable against that.
And ICAAN can hand your domain over to US law enforcement regardless of the TLD and your register.
Is that also part of your decision tree?
That would be just a nuisance until a new certificate is generated with another vendor (possibly not for free, but cheap enough).
@Sibbo Of course. Actually, there are 200 million active certificates issued by Letsencrypt. Revoking them, 200 million websites would be down. 200 million websites all over the world, including US. I don't think this is a realistic scenario.
If you are worried about that, you should avoid any software developed in US. You should avoid any software which itself or its sources are hosted in US. Mastodon is available on Github, this is Microsoft. US authorities may force Github to shutdown or infiltrate the hosted sources with spyware.
Actually the problem is that they are too widespread. if something happened, and they started creating fake certificates, for outside force or otherwise, they can’t just be blocked because literally half of the internet or more breaks. what’s worse, if browser vendors trued that, people would be downgrading their browser to the last version accepting it, and become exposed to publicly revealed security vulnerabilities. not all because its a bit complicated, but enough would do to have it cause an even greater problem.
You do make a good point. However, Let’s encrypt is run by the IRSG which is a non profit focused on improving internet security. They are the ones who are pushing for shorter certificate lifetimes among other things.
First let’s identify what parts of the world are free-er than the US (for a certificate).
Malta or Cyprus maybe? My first thought is places where dodgy people do dodgy shit, like gambling.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CA | (SSL) Certificate Authority |
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
[Thread #107 for this comm, first seen 19th Sep 2026, 15:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago is it possible to get the eff to move elsewhere?
And give up the best weather and access to 5 star restaurants in the world? Surely you jest!
You need to restructure your priorities.
Or use a ca, vps and dns provider that’s hostile to the west.
It’s not a question of supporting “freedom” and if you insist that it is, I will gladly provide all those services to you for a slight markup (price of freedom!).
It is surprisingly easy to add a custom CA to phones and laptops. When I migrated to services using one with names like thisservice.lan I thought it would be a lot harder. I just have a generation script that makes a new cert and I throw it in NGINX.
Just don’t get too close to TV’s or streaming boxes. Wildly different levels of hell
Very true. I do have a let’s encrypt wildcard cert that I also use with internal IPs for instances like this. But most of my items don’t require that.
Why not use veracrypt instead?
Let’s Encrypt is a certificate authority, the one making sure the green lock on HTTPS sites stays green.
Veracrypt is an encryption software.
Didn’t know that. Thanks.
maiuz@mastodon.uno 2 weeks ago @Sibbo
I use Italian Actalis (https://www.actalis.com/) with Caddy even if I do not think that is free-er
I just self-host Bitwarden.
you don’t know how bitwarden works, do you?
Nope, America bad! CIA has magic that let’s them break modern encryption because they employ John Hackwrman!
themurphy@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Is anyone wonders why it’s a problem it’s under US juristriction:
Look up the US Cloud Act. It’s everything the media told you China was, but in the hands of an orange dictator.
philipp_@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
They have strong canaries in place, namely certificate transparency. They wisely designed themselves in a way to prevent themselves from tampering.
themurphy@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Well, honestly?
Since these certificates are not banned nor up for debate, they probably already have a way to get all the data through another loop hole.
Yes, it protects against “attacks” from outside, but it’s naive to expect they dont have another way in.
njordomir@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
'Muricans are so racist, we heard “orange chicken” and thought they were talking about China. 🤣
flandish@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
every single accusation is an admission