1 mo. ago • 99%

Let's Encrypt is 10 years old today !

Let's Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority brought to you by the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). Read all about our nonprofit work this year in our 2023 Annual Report.

Happy birthday to Let's Encrypt !

Huge thanks to everyone involved in making HTTPS available to everyone for free !

84 comments

Man I love let's encrypt, remember how terrible ssl was before the project landed?

152
- Crazy times. Nowadays it's weird when a website doesn't have https. Back then it was pretty much big companies only. And the price of a wildcard certificate...
  
  65
  
  Except for neverssl.com
  
  Triggering the launch of captive portals for public Wi-Fi users everywhere yayy
  
  10
- I did not have the money to pay the insane amounts these greedy for-profit certificate authorities asked, so I only remember the pain of trying to setup my self-signed root certificate on my several devices/browsers, and then being unable to recover my private key because I went over the top with securing it.
  
  31
- And if you remember, that this whole shebang was only started, because Snowden revealed that the NSA spied on all of us, it's getting much much darker.
  
  23
  
  People behave as if having a green lock icon were enough to consider you're safe.
  
  People behave as if there were not multiple cases of abuse of PKI.
  
  People behave as if all those whistleblowing cases exposing widespread illegal activities by the state were not treated as normal, except those exposing them being chased and vilified.
  
  What I'm trying to say is that we're past the stage where techno-optimism about the Internet made sense. They just say in the news that abusing you is good, and everybody just takes it.
  
  4
- I always had to fill out multiple pages of forms to get those free 1 year "trial" certs from startssl.
  
  13
  
  Oh man, I forgot about startssl until just now. I definitely had a few of those certs. If you wanted something fancy like a wildcard cert back then, you were paying $$$
  
  4
- Remember they wanted like $75 for certs? The gall.
  
  11
- I remember the days when each site that wanted to use SSL had to have a dedicated IP.
  
  1
- When you have to use it, then yes. But in general standard technologies of today are mostly rigged.
  
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And it changed the Internet, for good and a lot.

50
SSL Certs were so god awful before certbot that it’s hard to explain now that it’s so easy and free.

47
- Also fucking expensive
  
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Damn! That's definitely a "I'm old" moment for me. I still remember when I first heard about the concept and I remember setting it up the first time on a self hosted project (which seemed harder back then).

Awesome project!

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A client of mine pays for an SSL cert he doesn’t even use. I’ve told him before I moved him to Let’s Encrypt because I was able to automate the renew process. He decided he needed to continue paying for the SSL cert. I told him we are not using it, but he doesn’t believe me. So he continues to pay for it.

31
- I love it when companies are too stubborn to update their costs despite the necessity changing over the years.
  
  My previous employment kept buying microsoft office license keys despite us already moving to 365. They probably did it out of habit when buying new computers. Needless to say I have a cardstack of license keys at home lol. Granted it’s for Office 2013 but I don’t really need the latest version for basic document processing.
  
  5
  
  Private sector is more efficient my ass
  
  3
- TLS certificates have huge margins, so web hosts love selling them.
  
  3
Lol I instinctively freaked out when I saw the post preview assuming it was going to be a post about a major data breach or exploit of some sort relating to Let's Encrypt.

I probably need more positivity in my life 😂

30
I worked for a company we had 300 websites, the boss wanted to buy certs. I told him about Lets Encrypt. He loved the idea it saved us a bunch of money. I suggest we donate $100 to them. Hes says "NO F-ing way!".

23
And my parents still buy SSL certs because that's just what they know 🤢

19
- My last cert renewal was $20 for 3 years. That's less than a dollar a month, not exactly breaking the bank.
  
  3
  
  It's been a bit since I've asked them, but they certainly complained about the cost before. Almost as much as the hosting itself for sure.
  
  1
- Today it's just more or less stupid to buy SSL you can get one extremely easy for free from Let's Encrypt or Google Trust..
  
  3
  
  Yeah, I uh...I think that's kinda what this whole conversation here is about
  
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  I've tried explaining to them before, but they think that it's a scam because it's free lol
  
  3
It doesn't say on the website but on their anniversary day they are giving away unlimited ssl certs!

16
- Well, they do rate limit
  
  2
Let's Encrypt is amazing, but are there any equally trustworthy alternatives people could switch to if something bad happens to it?

16
- 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.
  
  12
  
  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.
  
  12
- 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."
  
  8
  
  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.
  
  8
  
  I think Cloudflare enshittifying is a bigger risk that Let's Encrypt.
  
  2
- Maybe ZeroSSL
  
  7
  
  They don't offer wildcard certs, but otherwise I think they are.
  I wanna say acme.sh defaults to them.
  
  1
- 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, just with some config changes.
  
  2
Huge impact on a tiny budget - that’s extremely impressive. The world could be so much better without rent seeking parasites.

15
Just two months ago, a security team member dinged one of our services for using Lets Encrypt, as "it's not as secure as a traditional CA".

10
- I'd love for them to explain how, if anything the short cert validity and constant re-checking of the domain seems more secure than traditional CAs
  
  15
  
  I'd also argue that the fact that it's 100% automated and their software is open source makes it objectively more secure. On the issuing side, there's no room for human error, social engineering, etc.
  
  7
- It's sad that these arguments are still being shared. It was the same arguments years ago from people that would just assume that a free cert was inherently unsafe.
  
  4
Can anyone fill me on this? Why is it so significant?

9
- HTTPS certs used to be very expensive and technically complicated, making it out of reach for most smaller orgs. Let's Encrypt brought easy mass adoption and changed encryption availability on the web for everyone.
  
  39
  
  They also made it a open protocol (the ACME protocol), so now there's a bunch of certificate providers that implement the same protocol and thus can work with the same client apps (Certbot, acme.sh, etc). I know Sectigo and GoDaddy support ACME at least. So even if you don't use Let's Encrypt, you can still benefit from their work.
  
  7
- It is the free, easy way to get an SSL cert (plus automated renewals). Without it, maybe HTTPS wouldn't have been so omnipresent.
  
  17
  
  And it shouldn't have been, SSL PKI is an intentionally rigged architecture. It's intended for nation-states to be able to abuse it.
  
  I'd like much more some kind of overlay encryption over HTTP based on web of trust and what not. Like those distributed imageboards people were trying to make with steganography in emotion.
  
  It's a trap. Everybody is already in it and it has already been activated, so - the discussion would be of historical interest only.
  
  2
Yay for their glorious, free trusted ssl certs. Love this project!

8
Lots of people shitting on stories of people who buy certs.

You do still have to buy a cert if you want one for a .onion. Let's encrypt still doesn't support it :(

7
- But...an onion address doesn't need a cert?
  
  1
  
  Some apps refuse to work if you dont have TLS, so it depends what you're running
  
  3
- I’m also having to manually cert every 3 months for my emby instance. It’s a minor inconvenience, but I’m definitely tempted to just buy a yearly.
  
  1
  
  Why not script it so you don't have to do it manually?
  
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  Emby?
  
  1
Underrated. Stuff rocks.

6
Sleeping too well lately? Consider this:

If LetsEncrypt were to suffer a few weeks outage, how much of the internet would break?

3
- If you have a fully automated setup. Youll have 30 days to mitigate the fallout.
  
  4
  
  It won't be that simple.
  
  For starters, you're assuming t-zero response. It'll likely be a week before people worry enough that LE isn't returning before they act. Then they have to find someone else for, possibly, the hundreds or thousands of certs they are responsible for. Set up processes with them. Hope that this new provide is able to cope with the massive, MASSIVE surge in demand without falling over themselves.
  
  And that's assuming your company knows all its certs. That they haven't changed staff and lost knowledge, or outsourced IT (in which case they provider is likely staggering under the weight of all their clients demanding instant attention) and all that goes with that. Automation is actually bad in this situation because people tend to forget how stuff was done until it breaks. It's very likely that many certs will simply expire because they were forgotten about and the first thing some companies knows is when customers start complaining.
  
  LetsEncrypt is genuinely brilliant, but we've all added a massive single point of failure into our systems by adopting it.
  
  (Yeah, I've written a few disaster plans in my time. Why do you ask?)
  
  3
- Shouldn't be too difficult to swap it out for ZeroSSL. You'd need to remember to update CAA records though.
  
  1
That's very great news! Thank you for all the good work!

2
I'm sad to say that all my sites where http only until 10 years ago

2
- Well, you usually had to pay extra back then!
  
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