I’m curious what the benefits are of paying for SSL certificates vs using a free provider such as letsencrypt.
What exactly are you trusting a cert provider with and what are the security implications? What attack vectors do you open yourself up to when trusting a certificate authority with your websites’ certificates?
In what way could it benefit security and/or privacy to utilize a paid service?
And finally, which paid SSL providers are considered trustworthy?
I know Digicert is a big player, but their prices are insane. Comodo seems like a good affordable option, but is it a trustworthy company?
AFAIK, the only reason not to use Letsencrypt are when you are not able to automate the process to change the certificate.
As the paid certificates are valid for 12 month, you have to change them less often than a letsencrypt certificate.
At work, we pay something like 30-50€ for a certificate for a year. As changing certificates costs, it is more economical to buy a certificate.
But generally, it is best to use letsencrypt when you can automate the process (e.g. with nginx).
As for the question of trust: The process of issuing certificates is done in a way that the certificate authority never has access to your private key. You don’t trust the CA with anything (except your payment data maybe).
There are more reasons, as LetsEncrypt might be more restrictive on what you can get (for example, you cant get a certificate for an IP address from them). But, as 99.99% of usecases do not require anything like that, go with letsencrypt until you know of a reason not to.
PSA: All public certificates (private internal certificates won’t be affected) will have a lifetime of only 90 days soon. Google is planning to reduce their lifetime in 2024 but considering that they haven’t given an update on this since early this year, I doubt it will happen this year.
But it will happen soon.
This will be a pain in the ass for my workplace because we primarily use Digicert and manually renewing certificates every 90 days is just impossible for use. We are currently looking into a way to switch to letsencrypt or similar.
The background is that certificate revocation is a broken system and having short lived certificates makes the problem go away. You don’t need to worry about how to tell people that some certificate is bad if it’s only valid for a few days.
Ideally, certificates would only be valid for a few days, it should be automated anyway. This has other downsides as I can imagine, like creation of more traffic.
My self signed CA for my home LAN has 4 days as standard, and it works perfectly fine.
It’s just that it will create a lot of work for us (especially for me and my colleague) short term. I would very much appreciate it if Google actually bothered to give an exact timeline (optimally a few months or a year in advance).
a reduction of TLS server authentication subscriber certificate maximum validity from 398 days to 90 days. Reducing certificate lifetime encourages automation and the adoption of practices that will drive the ecosystem away from baroque, time-consuming, and error-prone issuance processes. These changes will allow for faster adoption of emerging security capabilities and best practices, and promote the agility required to transition the ecosystem to quantum-resistant algorithms quickly. Decreasing certificate lifetime will also reduce ecosystem reliance on “broken” revocation checking solutions that cannot fail-closed and, in turn, offer incomplete protection. Additionally, shorter-lived certificates will decrease the impact of unexpected Certificate Transparency Log disqualifications.
The person isn’t talking about automating being difficult for a hosted website. They’re talking about a third party system that doesn’t give you an easy way to automate, just a web gui for uploading a cert. For example, our WAP interface or our on-premise ERP don’t offer a way to automate. Sure, we could probably create code to automate it and run the risk it breaks after a vendor update. It’s easier to pay for a 12 month cert and do it manually.
There’s a certbot addon which uses nginx directly to renew the certificate (so you don’t need to stop the web server to renew). If you install the addon you just use the same certbot commands but with --nginx instead and it will perform the actions without interfering with web server operation.
You just then make sure the cron job to renew also includes --nginx and you’re done.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !selfhosted@lemmy.world
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.
Rules:
Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
AFAIK, the only reason not to use Letsencrypt are when you are not able to automate the process to change the certificate.
As the paid certificates are valid for 12 month, you have to change them less often than a letsencrypt certificate.
At work, we pay something like 30-50€ for a certificate for a year. As changing certificates costs, it is more economical to buy a certificate.
But generally, it is best to use letsencrypt when you can automate the process (e.g. with nginx).
As for the question of trust: The process of issuing certificates is done in a way that the certificate authority never has access to your private key. You don’t trust the CA with anything (except your payment data maybe).
LE only certify your domain name, you may want to put more (like company name) to cert and it is where classic certs providers come to help.
There are more reasons, as LetsEncrypt might be more restrictive on what you can get (for example, you cant get a certificate for an IP address from them). But, as 99.99% of usecases do not require anything like that, go with letsencrypt until you know of a reason not to.
No proper CA should give out a certificate for an IP, that’s a no go by the common rules.
I see why automatically giving them out (like in ACME) would be a bad idea, but other than that, why not? Even https://1.1.1.1 has a DigiCert cert.
PSA: All public certificates (private internal certificates won’t be affected) will have a lifetime of only 90 days soon. Google is planning to reduce their lifetime in 2024 but considering that they haven’t given an update on this since early this year, I doubt it will happen this year.
But it will happen soon.
This will be a pain in the ass for my workplace because we primarily use Digicert and manually renewing certificates every 90 days is just impossible for use. We are currently looking into a way to switch to letsencrypt or similar.
The background is that certificate revocation is a broken system and having short lived certificates makes the problem go away. You don’t need to worry about how to tell people that some certificate is bad if it’s only valid for a few days.
Ideally, certificates would only be valid for a few days, it should be automated anyway. This has other downsides as I can imagine, like creation of more traffic. My self signed CA for my home LAN has 4 days as standard, and it works perfectly fine.
Yeah, absolutely!
I actually like the change.
It’s just that it will create a lot of work for us (especially for me and my colleague) short term. I would very much appreciate it if Google actually bothered to give an exact timeline (optimally a few months or a year in advance).
You’re right, Google released their vision in 2023, here is what it says regarding lifespan:
How does nginx automate that?
I meant certbot with nginx plugin and http-01 challenge.
The person isn’t talking about automating being difficult for a hosted website. They’re talking about a third party system that doesn’t give you an easy way to automate, just a web gui for uploading a cert. For example, our WAP interface or our on-premise ERP don’t offer a way to automate. Sure, we could probably create code to automate it and run the risk it breaks after a vendor update. It’s easier to pay for a 12 month cert and do it manually.
There’s a certbot addon which uses nginx directly to renew the certificate (so you don’t need to stop the web server to renew). If you install the addon you just use the same certbot commands but with --nginx instead and it will perform the actions without interfering with web server operation.
You just then make sure the cron job to renew also includes --nginx and you’re done.
Oh, that… I think i’m using it but it seems.to expect a response from 80 when all I have there is a redirect to 443.
I thought you meant an nginx plugin.
Yes you need both 80 and 443 for certbot to work. Anyway having 80 to redirect to 443 is common and not a security risk.
I have auto redirect to 443. But --nginx works fine. I think it overrides stuff for whatever the specific url used is.