[HN Gopher] 10 Years of Let's Encrypt
___________________________________________________________________
10 Years of Let's Encrypt
Author : SGran
Score : 372 points
Date : 2025-12-09 18:54 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (letsencrypt.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (letsencrypt.org)
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Wow. Feels like Let's encrypt been around for longer.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Agreed! What were we using before Let's Encrypt again? Maybe
| just plain HTTP
| bakies wrote:
| Self signed certs. I wasn't paying.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Some of them were not expensive but it was not convenient
| at all.
| rew0rk wrote:
| either you used http, self signed if you did not mind the
| warning, and i remember there being one company that did
| offer free certificates that validated, but cant remember the
| name of it
| tomklein wrote:
| I believe it was StartSSL and/or WoSign back then
| SahAssar wrote:
| > i remember there being one company that did offer free
| certificates that validated, but cant remember the name of
| it
|
| You're probably thinking of StartSSL, and it was a bit of a
| pain to get it done.
| asadotzler wrote:
| SSL/TLS via expensive and hard to work with providers and
| tooling. Let's Encrypt made it free and easy to maintain.
| ZeroConcerns wrote:
| Mostly Verisign, which required faxing forms and eye-watering
| amounts of money. Then Thawte, which brought down prices to a
| more manageable US$500 per host or so. Which might seem
| excessive, but was really peanuts compared to the price of
| the 'SSL accelerator' SBus card that you also needed to serve
| more than, like, 2 concurrent HTTPS connections.
|
| And you try telling young people that ACME is a walk in the
| park, and they won't believe you...
| anamexis wrote:
| And then sketchy resellers for Verisign/Thawte, which were
| cheap but invariably had websites that ironically did not
| inspire confidence in typing in your credit card number.
| dylan604 wrote:
| As GP posited, because of this headache, lots of web
| traffic was plain ol' HTTP. Let's Encrypt is owed a lot of
| credit for drastically reducing plain ol' HTTP.
| SirMaster wrote:
| I was using StartCom StartSSL which was offering free 1 year
| certificates at least for my personal sites.
| 0x0 wrote:
| They were great in the beginning, and then when you issued
| a few more certs than they liked you were asked to pony up
| some $$$, and then when you did that and actually
| "verified" who you were on a personal international phone
| call, you got a grace, and then issued a few more, they
| decided they didn't like you so they would randomly reject
| your renewals close to the expiration date, and then they
| got bought out by some scummy foreign outfit which
| apparently caused the entire CA to be de-listed as
| untrustworthy in all major browsers. Quite the ride.
|
| Also, the only website I've ever encountered that actually
| used the HTML <keygen> tag.
| 1f60c wrote:
| The pros were using client-side encryption :D
| quesera wrote:
| I was going to say the opposite. LE still feels like the "new"
| way, to me. :)
| jjice wrote:
| Let's Encrypt was _huge_ in making it's absurd to not have TLS
| and now we (I, at least) take it for granted because it's just
| the baseline for any website I build. Incredible, free service
| that helped make the web a more secure place. What a wonderful
| service - thank you to the entire team.
|
| The CEO at my last company (2022) refused to use Let's Encrypt
| because "it looked cheap to customers". That is absurd to me
| because 1), it's (and was at the time) the largest certificate
| authority in the world, and 2) I've never seen someone care about
| who issued your cert on a sales call. It coming from GoDaddy is
| not a selling point...
|
| So my question: has anyone actually commented to you in a
| negative way about using Let's Encrypt? I couldn't imagine, but
| curious on others' experiences.
| rokkamokka wrote:
| No! Let's encrypt is easily the best thing that's happened for
| a secure internet the last 10 years.
| johnebgd wrote:
| There are extended certificates that did matter in our sales
| process for some hosted solutions back about 15 years ago if I
| recall right... no one has ever cared since...
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > It coming from GoDaddy is not a selling point...
|
| I just people who use GoDaddy. They were the one company
| supporting SOPA when the entire rest of the internet was
| opposed to SOPA. It's very obvious GoDaddy is run by "business-
| bros" and not hackers or tech bros.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This is my feeling as well. Finding out someone uses GoDaddy
| is a bit of a shibboleth.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I've seen people complain that Let's Encrypt is so easy that
| it's enabling the forced phaseout of long-lived certificates
| and unencrypted HTTP.
|
| I sort of understand this, although it does feel like going
| "bcrypt is so easy to use it's enabling standards agencies to
| force me to use something newer than MD5". Like, yeah, once the
| secure way is sufficiently easy to use, we can then push
| everyone off the insecure way; that's how it's _supposed_ to
| work.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Like, yeah, once the secure way is sufficiently easy to
| use, we can then push everyone off the insecure way; that's
| how it's supposed to work.
|
| The problem is that this requires work and validation, which
| no beancounter ever plans for. And the underlings have to do
| the work, but don't get extra time, so it has to be crammed
| in, condensing the workday even more. For hobbyist projects
| it's even worse.
|
| That is why people are so pissed, there is absolutely zero
| control over what the large browser manufacturers decide on a
| whim. It's one thing if banks or Facebook or other truly
| large entities get to do work... but personal blogs and the
| likes?
| nottorp wrote:
| > but personal blogs and the likes?
|
| Yep, the result of the current security hysteria/theater is
| it makes it increasingly difficult to maintain an
| independent web presence.
|
| Yes, I know, you can just use Cloudflare and depend on
| it...
| eastbound wrote:
| Cloudflare uses HTTP to connect to your website before
| caching the content. I've always found it highly
| insecure. You could have HTTPS with Letsencrypt, but you
| need to deactivate Cloudflare when you want to renew (or
| use the other validation that is complex enough that I
| didn't succeed to do it).
| nottorp wrote:
| Don't pick on this particular SSL requirement, pick on
| the deluge of requirements that only make sense for a
| site that sells something or handles personal data (i.e.
| has accounts). They get extended to $RANDOM_SITE that
| only serves static text and the occasional cat photo for
| no good reason except "your cats will be more secure!".
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| TLS only takes a few minutes to add to a self hosted
| solution, just plop caddy in front of your server
| foresto wrote:
| I can understand this in in certain contexts, such as a site
| that exists solely to post public information of no value to
| an attacker.
|
| A local volunteer group that posts their event schedule to
| the web were compelled to take on the burden of https just to
| keep their site from being labeled as a potential threat.
| They don't have an IT department. They aren't tech people.
| The change multiplied the hassles of maintaining their site.
| To them, it is all additional cost with practically no
| benefit over what they had before.
| charcircuit wrote:
| This is why more and more organizations get away with only
| having social media pages where they don't have to worry
| about security or other technical issues.
| foresto wrote:
| Unfortunately, placing the information on a social media
| page burdens the people seeking it with either submitting
| to the social media site's policies and practices, or
| else not having access to it. This is not a good
| substitute.
|
| It also contributes to the centralization of the web,
| placing more information under the control of large
| gatekeepers, and as a side effect, giving those
| gatekeepers even more influence.
| mook wrote:
| Yeah, I hate how it made housing things locally without a
| proper domain name very difficult. My router _shouldn't_ have
| a globally recognized certificate, because it's not on a
| publicly visible host.
|
| There's certainly advantages to easily available
| certificates, but that has enabled browsers and others to
| push too far; to be sure, though, that's not really a fault
| of Let's Encrypt, just the people who assume it's somehow
| globally applicable.
| rplnt wrote:
| Random anecdote: I have a device in which the http client
| can't handle https. Runs out of memory and crashes. Wasn't
| able to find a free host with a public http to host a proxy.
| UltraSane wrote:
| I have worked at companies that refused to use LetsEncrypt for
| the same reason.
| quesera wrote:
| There was a time when EV certificates were considered more
| trustworthy than DV certs. Browsers used to show an indication
| for EV certs.
|
| Those days are long gone, and I'm not completely sure how I
| feel about it. I hated the EV renewal/rotation process, so
| definitely a win on the day-to-day scale, but I still feel like
| something was lost in the transition.
| trueismywork wrote:
| What about OV?
| ekr____ wrote:
| It's never been clear to me what the rationale for OV was,
| as the UI wasn't even different like EV was.
| quesera wrote:
| I've never seen (noticed) an OV cert in real life, and no
| business I've ever been responsible for pushed for OV over
| DV. It was always EV or "huh?"
| Sesse__ wrote:
| Before LE, we did lots of OV (which you generally could
| get a couple of for free from somewhere). We had to dig
| up stuff like a heating bill, because evidently that is
| proof of organizational control to some people.
| bostik wrote:
| I think I've seen one or two, and only because I noticed
| them as a weird callout in a $LARGE_FINANCE_INSTITUTION
| infosec bingo sheet. Of course I _had_ to check that they
| really were running with OV certs.
|
| Some of the outfits in that space will be heavily hit by
| the shortening certificate max-lifetimes, and I do hope
| that the insurance companies at some point also stop
| demanding a cert rotation before 90 days to expiry. It's
| a weird feeling to redline a corporate insurance policy
| when their standard requirements are 15 years out of
| date.
| quesera wrote:
| > _when their standard requirements are 15 years out of
| date_
|
| I swear half of my "compensating control" responses are
| just extended versions of "policy requirement is outdated
| or was always bad".
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > has anyone actually commented to you in a negative way about
| using Let's Encrypt?
|
| A friend of mine has had a negative experience insofar as they
| are working for a small company, using maybe only 15-20 certs
| and one day they started getting hounded by Let's Encrypt
| multiple times on the email address they used for ACME
| registration.
|
| Let's Encrcypt were chasing donations and were promptly told
| where to stick it with their unsolicited communications. Let's
| Encrypt also did zero research about who they were targetting,
| i.e. trying to get a small company to shell out $50k as a
| "donation".
|
| My friend was of the opinion is that if you're going to charge,
| then charge, but don't offer it for free and then go looking
| for payment via the backdoor.
|
| In a business environment getting a donation approved is almost
| always an entirely different process, involving completely
| different people in the company, than getting a product or
| service purchase approved. Even more so if, like Let's Encrypt,
| you are turning up on the doorstep asking for $50k a pop.
| jfindper wrote:
| > _one day they started getting hounded by Let 's Encrypt
| multiple times_
|
| > _trying to get a small company to shell out $50k as a
| "donation"._
|
| > _Even more so if, like Let 's Encrypt, you are turning up
| on the doorstep asking for $50k a pop._
|
| Does your friend have anything to corroborate this claim?
| Perhaps the email with identifying details censored?
|
| I have a received an occasional email mentioning donations.
| They are extremely infrequent and never ask me for a specific
| amount. I would be incredibly surprised to see evidence of "
| _hounding_ " and requests for $50,000.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| All the usual phishing checks were done if that's what
| you're thinking.
|
| In terms of the actual mail with identifying details
| removed, I'd have to go back and ask.
|
| I did look before posting here as I thought they had
| already forwarded it to me, but it was last year, so I have
| almost certainly cleaned up my Inbox since. I'm not an
| Inbox hoarder.
| cjaybo wrote:
| "They sent a few emails soliciting donations" isn't exactly a
| horror story in my experience. Seems hardly worth mentioning!
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's not something to stop using them over, but unsolicited
| solicitation emails are annoying at the least. It's
| definitely worth mentioning letting other people know they
| have warts too
| traceroute66 wrote:
| To be clear, I was merely answering the question posed _"
| has anyone actually commented to you in a negative way
| about using Let's Encrypt?"_
|
| Well, yes, someone actually commented to me in a negative
| way about using Let's Encrypt ....
|
| Don't shoot the messenger, as they say.
| btown wrote:
| To be fair, for a CEO in 2022, EV certificates had only lost
| their special visualizations since September/October 2019 with
| Chrome 77 and Firefox 70 - and with all that would happen in
| the following months, one could be forgiven for not adapting to
| new browser best practices!
|
| https://www.troyhunt.com/extended-validation-certificates-ar...
| yabones wrote:
| Call me old-school, but I _really_ liked how EV certs looked
| in the browser. Same with the big green lock icon Firefox
| used to have. I know it 's all theatrics at best and a scam
| at worst, but I really feel like it's a bit of a downgrade.
| wnevets wrote:
| > Call me old-school, but I really liked how EV certs
| looked in the browser.
|
| I agree, making EV Certs visually more important makes
| sense to people who know what it means and what it doesn't.
| Too bad they never made it an optional setting.
| arccy wrote:
| i think the point was that EV didn't actually mean
| anything because the checks were too loose. it's a feel
| good false sense of security
| RonanSoleste wrote:
| When you request an EV. They call you by the phone number
| that you give to ask if you requested a certificate. That
| was the complete extend of the validation. I could be a
| scammer with a specificity designed domain name and they
| would just accept it, no questions asked.
| Uvix wrote:
| Depends on the registrar. Globalsign required the phone
| number to be one publicly listed for the company in some
| business registry (I forget exactly which one), so it had
| to be someone in our main corporate office who'd deal
| with them on the phone.
| bangaladore wrote:
| For an online business in a dubious (but legal) domain,
| my co-owner spent a few hundred bucks registering a
| business in New Mexico with a registered agent to get an
| EV cert.
|
| So, a barrier to entry, but not much of one.
| wnevets wrote:
| > In addition to all of the authentication steps CAs take
| for DV and OV certificates, EV certificates require
| vetting of the business organization's operational
| existence, physical address and a telephone call to
| verify the employment status of the requestor. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.digicert.com/difference-between-dv-ov-
| and-ev-ssl...
|
| Tying a phone number to a physical address and company is
| a lot more useful than just proof of control over a
| domain. Of course its not 100% fool proof and depends on
| the quality of the CA but still very useful.
| matrss wrote:
| > Tying a phone number to a physical address and company
| is a lot more useful than just proof of control over a
| domain.
|
| It might be useful in some cases, but it is never any
| more secure than domain validation. Which is why browsers
| don't treat it in a special way anymore, but if you want
| you can still get EV certificates.
| monerozcash wrote:
| It was easy to provide the information for an existing
| business you're completely unrelated to. Reliably
| verifying that a person actually represents a company
| isn't possible in most of the world.
| fpoling wrote:
| Many countries has official register of companies with at
| least post box address. Requiring to answer a physical
| letter sent to an address from the central register will
| be much more reliable.
| realityking wrote:
| EV certs also showed the legal name of the company that
| requested the certificate - that was an advantage.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Which would have made sense if company names were unique
| - which they aren't. See e.g. https://groups.google.com/g
| /mozilla.dev.security.policy/c/Nj... for an example of
| how this was abused.
| brians wrote:
| Having run an EV issuing practice... they were required
| to contact you at a D&B listed number or address.
| AlbinoDrought wrote:
| I'd love a referral to your certificate authority and rep
| - we go through a big kerfluffle each renewal period,
| only eventually receiving the certificate after a long
| exchange of government docs and CPA letters. For us, only
| the last step is the phonecall like you say.
| wnevets wrote:
| The replies to my original comment make it obvious who
| has gotten an EV cert from a quality CA before and who
| hasn't.
| woleium wrote:
| it's okay, the scam continues with BIMI
| unethical_ban wrote:
| EV validated not only that a domain was under control of the
| server requesting the cert, but that the domain was under
| control of the entity claiming it.
|
| I kind of wish they still had it, and I kind of wish browsers
| indicated that a cert was signed by a global CA (real cert
| store trusted by the browsers) or an aftermarket CA, so
| people can see that their stuff is being decrypted by their
| company.
| arccy wrote:
| you can find quite of few examples online that the entity
| check wasn't all that strict...
| tadfisher wrote:
| Problem is, I can easily set up a company and get an EV
| cert for "FooBar Technologies, LLC" and phish customers
| looking for "FooBar Incorporated" or "International FooBar
| Corp.". Approximately zero users know the actual entity
| name of the real FooBar.
| matrss wrote:
| Even if the users knew exactly what the name of the
| entity whose website they wanted to visit was: that name
| is not unique, as is shown by the "Stripe, Inc" example
| in the parents linked blog post.
| charlesbarbier wrote:
| It was a red herring the entire time. At Shopify we made
| experiment regarding conversion between regular certs and EV
| before they stop being displayed and there was no significant
| difference. The users don't notice the absence of the fancier
| green lock.
| smurda wrote:
| I loved the visualization of EV certs in browsers, but in
| 2014 vendors like GoDaddy charged $100/yr for them. https://w
| eb.archive.org/web/20131023033903/http://www.godadd...
|
| I'm glad LE, browsers, and others like Cloudflare brought
| this cost to $0. Eliminating this unnecessary cost is good
| for the internet.
| qwertox wrote:
| I once notified Porsche that one of their websites had an
| expired certificate, they fixed it within a couple of hours by
| using Let's Encrypt. It surprised me.
|
| Let's Encrypt is to the internet what SSDs are to the PC. A
| level up.
| xxmarkuski wrote:
| I have heard, but do not aggree, that Let's Encrypt is risky,
| because phishing sites use it. It's implied that other CAs do
| checks against it.
| anonymars wrote:
| I will say, I have never before this season seen so many
| seemingly-legit fake web stores. All with their little lock
| icons in the address bar. I assume LLMs helped kick it into
| overdrive too
| npodbielski wrote:
| I am glad to be one of the users using that for around 7 years. I
| can't think of how much better is life of people just doing blogs
| or some silly websites with free https certs. Would I pay 50$
| bucks a year for ability to self host nextcloud? Probably not.
| But security enhancement is so enormous with that service. Thanks
| to everyone involved for making world a little bit better.
| greyface- wrote:
| New baseline expectation that web traffic will be encrypted on
| the wire: very good!
|
| New de-facto requirement that you need to receive the blessing of
| a CA to make use of basic web platform features... not so good.
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| That's not new, LetsEncrypt just didn't solve it. And if you
| think this is the only single point of failure in the stack, I
| have news for you.
| greyface- wrote:
| It's absolutely new. No HTML5 features were restricted to
| secure origins only pre-LE. Today, many are. Google was able
| to push these requirements in large part due to Let's
| Encrypt's success making secure origins ubiquitous.
| ekr____ wrote:
| The order of events is a bit more complicated than this.
|
| Google initially proposed restricting powerful features to
| secure origins back in February of 2015 (https://web.archiv
| e.org/web/20150125103531/https://www.chrom...) and Mozilla
| proposed requiring secure origins for all new features in
| April of 2015
| (https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2015/04/30/deprecating-
| non...). Let's Encrypt issued its first certificate in
| September of 2015.
|
| This isn't to say that these two things are unrelated:
| Mozilla obviously knew about Let's Encrypt and we
| considered it an important complement for this kind of
| policy, and at least some people at Chrome knew about LE,
| though I'm not sure how it played into their thinking.
| However, it's not as simple as "LE happened and then people
| started pushing for secure origins for new features".
| ekr____ wrote:
| Can you elaborate a bit about what you mean by "the blessing of
| a CA"?
|
| I agree that it's true that you need a certificate to do TLS,
| but importantly Let's Encrypt isn't interested in what you do
| with your certificate, just that you actually control the
| domain name. See: https://letsencrypt.org/2015/10/29/phishing-
| and-malware.html
| greyface- wrote:
| Their policy today is to grant certificates liberally. There
| is no technical guarantee that this remains the case
| indefinitely, only a political one. I don't doubt the
| sincerity of this guarantee, but I wish I didn't have to rely
| on it.
| ekr____ wrote:
| I agree that technical guarantees are better than policy
| guarantees.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Kinda hear you, but DNS is a defacto requirement as well.
| Neither DNS (common TLDs) nor any of the major cert vendors I'm
| aware of ask you your site's business before issuing.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >ask you your site's business before issuing.
|
| Because they want your money. If they ask you after they get
| to keep your money.
| hulitu wrote:
| > 10 Years of Let's Encrypt
|
| Aren't they only 45 days [1] old ?
|
| [1] https://letsencrypt.org/2025/12/02/from-90-to-45
| p2detar wrote:
| Not sure if you're joking or not, but I have to deal with this
| upcoming change at some point and still haven't read in detail
| why they decided to do this.
|
| Could anyone clarify?
| chippiewill wrote:
| Lets Encrypt are doing is because of the decision that CAs
| and browser makers made that it needs to be reduced (browsers
| have been reducing the length of certs that they trust).
|
| The why is because it's safer: it reduces the validity period
| of private keys that could be used in a MITM attack if
| they're leaked. It also encourages automation of cert renewal
| which is also more secure. It also makes responding to
| incidents at certificate authorities more practical.
| dingaling wrote:
| > it reduces the validity period of private keys that could
| be used in a MITM attack if they're leaked
|
| If a private key is leaked, 45 days is sufficient to clean-
| out the accounts of all that company's customers. It might
| as well be 10 years.
|
| If cert compromise is really common enough to require a
| response then the cert lifetime should be measured in
| minutes.
| bifurcation wrote:
| Hi there, ISRG co-founder and current board member here. In
| brief, shorter lifetimes force people to automate (which,
| e.g., avoids outages from manual processes) and mitigates the
| broken state of revocation in the Web PKI. That latter point
| especially is what I understand to be driving the Web PKI
| toward ever-shorter lifetimes.
|
| I actually remember the discussion we had in ~2014 about what
| the default certificate lifetime should be. My opening bid
| was two weeks -- roughly the lifetime of an OCSP response.
| The choice to issue certificates with 90 day lifetimes was
| still quite aggressive in 2015, but it was a compromise with
| an even more aggressive position.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| With the move to ever shorter certs the risk to letsencrypt
| having an outage is higher.
|
| It would be nice to read more about what the organization
| is doing around resilience engineering so we can continue
| to be confident in depending on it issuing renewals in
| time.
|
| Do you publish any of this? DR plans? Etc.
|
| I don't mean for this to be a negative - really impressed
| by LE - but we've had a lot of Cloudflare outages recently
| and my mind is on vendor reliability & risk at the moment.
| mcpherrinm wrote:
| I'm the technical lead for Let's Encrypt SRE.
|
| Publishing more about our resilience engineering sounds
| like a great idea!
|
| I'll get that on our blogging schedule for next year
| nvader wrote:
| Wow, this might be the push I needed to automate certificate
| renewal on my personal website [0].
|
| Manually clicking `make renew-cert` was barely tolerable every
| quarter, but if I have to do it twice as frequently I may as
| well ask an LLM to figure it out on my behalf.
|
| [0]: https://danverbraganza.com
| bifurcation wrote:
| Heh, as I was saying about shorter lifetimes encouraging
| automation...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46210786
| nvader wrote:
| Yep, it's just the push I needed to get off my seat ;)
| dylan604 wrote:
| And that is the very point of the short life span. One year
| certs had the potential of the person responsible for the
| cert no longer being the same person at time of renewal.
| Making it easy to automate so that it was just a cron task
| meant it didn't matter how often the person responsible
| changed.
|
| Your pain and intolerance to that button push proves their
| intent.
| Decoy1008 wrote:
| I am so grateful for this. Bummer that they stopped with the
| email reminder, anyways I was wondering how this would work
| without active payments. Still amazing.
| callumgare wrote:
| Out of interest why do you care? I assume you're using acme to
| automate renewals. Is it in case that fails? Or do you work
| with some system that can't be automated?
| asim wrote:
| As a sysadmin in the 2007-2011 timeframe I literally used openssl
| to generate csrs, went to godaddy to purchase SSL certificates
| and then manually deployed them to servers. Man what a world of
| change. Let's encrypt is one the best services we've had on the
| internet. I wish we had more things like this.
| par wrote:
| i was doing this until a couple years back when a friend told
| me about LetsEncrypt! It's like _magic_!!
| scblock wrote:
| LE has been really great, particularly in running hobby web sites
| on the public internet. Getting certbot up and running wasn't
| hard, automating renewal wasn't hard, and because they have DNS-
| based pathways to verification you can use LE certificates for
| sites not exposed to the public internet as well. Combine it with
| something like Caddy and getting SSL for an app becomes the
| default without ever having to manage certificates by hand.
|
| I find it pretty amazing how far its come, and how big a change
| it has made to the internet in the decade it's been operating.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| it is hard to believe it's been ten years.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I'm not sure that I'm more surprised that it's only been 10 years
| or that it's been that long. I mean, that's a relatively quick
| turn around to pretty much dominate TLS certs to the point that
| it's the default for so many platforms... that HTTPS has become
| such a norm over the exception.
|
| On the other hand, has it really been that long, it seems just
| yesterday I was first trying to configure nginx for it. That
| said, since I discovered Caddy, I haven't really looked back,
| though I do use Traefik too.
|
| I mean, by comparison, it feels like IE6 took longer to die than
| Let's Encrypt has been around.
| awaseem wrote:
| Incredibly grateful for this project
| ok123456 wrote:
| Snowden was the other big reason that TLS became the de facto
| standard for every site.
|
| Prior to that, the consensus was that you only really needed TLS
| if you were dealing with money and wasn't worth the hassle
| otherwise. You could sniff traffic from Facebook and Twitter
| easily.
|
| I remember listening to a talk given by an IRS investigator in
| around 2008 about how they were able to do a sting and shutdown
| illegal internet casinos. They collected a good bulk of that
| evidence from clear-text packet captures of gambling sessions and
| messages. He preemptively answered the question of whether
| encryption was a hurdle, by saying no one used it.
| tptacek wrote:
| This is a retcon. Facebook rolled out TLS in 2011, 2 years
| before Snowden, and went TLS-by-default within a month of the
| Snowden disclosures. Google Mail was TLS-by-default in 2010.
| TLS was a universal best practice long before 2013 --- by 2010,
| you'd have gotten a sev:hi vulnerability flagged on your site
| if you hadn't implemented TLS. SSLLabs was 2009; BEAST was
| 2011, and was a huge global news story because of how widely
| deployed TLS was.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Yes. And I remember sniffing Facebook traffic in clear text
| in 2011. The fact remains that it was considered a
| significant engineering problem for them to deploy it. It was
| a "best practice" that most people rolled their eyes at.
|
| Most users and system owners didn't care unless money was
| being transacted.
|
| Between Snowden and ISPs injecting content into pages, the
| consensus changed.
| tptacek wrote:
| The consensus obviously changed. It's just that it changed
| years before the Snowden leaks.
| ok123456 wrote:
| The adversarial nature of the US Government changed the
| threat model, and it moved from a "nice to have" best
| practice to a business necessity. They were caught red-
| handed undermining the privacy of US citizens by
| systematically exploiting infrastructure vulnerabilities,
| for example, in Google, where messages flowed in clear
| text within nominally trusted contexts.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| I'm not sure that refutes the idea that encryption was
| uncommon. A couple tech giants with challenging threat models
| will be ahead of the curve.
|
| Google started tracking adoption of TLS in 2015, with
| adoption below 50% and some regions below 30%.
|
| https://transparencyreport.google.com/https/overview?hl=en
| schoen wrote:
| I think you're right that this consensus was clearly emerging
| then (I remember Firesheep in 2010 as another big
| identifiable contributing factor), but I remember actively
| asking _smaller_ sites to enable HTTPS in that era, and they
| would often refuse. So I think Snowden also contributed to
| the spread of the norm.
|
| It is possible that there's a retcon element, because it's
| not always clear in my memory exactly what year various sites
| became more favorably disposed towards the request to use
| HTTPS. So I could be misremembering some of them as agreeing
| post-Snowden when they'd actually agreed one year before, or
| something.
| tptacek wrote:
| I think it would be a stretch to say that Snowden did
| nothing to accelerate the uptake; for better and worse he
| clearly did. But he didn't set it into motion; we were
| going to have an all-TLS Internet within a decade with or
| without him.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| I think it was a lot earlier than 2013 - SSL was inevitable by
| the late 2000's, as soon as major ISPs decided they could make
| more money by injecting ads into http connections (e.g., [1]).
| It obviously took a while for the infrastructure to scale up
| ... but I'd imagine that concerns about stolen ad impressions
| drove a lot more HTTPS adoption than concerns about the NSA.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Let's Encrypt is something so amazingly valuable that I was
| certain it'd be killed dead within a year to prop up the existing
| SSL cert business.
|
| Congrats on a decade, ya'll, here's to many, many more in
| securing the free internet.
| Havoc wrote:
| Reminder that it's a non profit
| vadepaysa wrote:
| LetsEncrypt is on my end of year Donate list for the past 5
| years. With all modern browsers requiring HTTPS everywhere, a
| world without Let's Encrypt would be really difficult for indie
| developers.
|
| Thank You for an amazing product!
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| my friends work here! and it was founded by an alum from my
| school Macalester College
| postbase wrote:
| thank you for your service
| t1234s wrote:
| Lets hope they stay independent and _never_ get acquired by
| Google or any other large tech company. You can imagine a web
| where SSL issuance is used as a tool to censor websites. I think
| most browsers have been made to make standard http sites look
| malicious to normal users.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| They're a nonprofit - so they can't be acquired like a typical
| for-profit company. They could in theory sell some assets but
| it'd be very convoluted if they were the core assets -- per US
| tax law, nonprofit assets must remain in the nonprofit world,
| so there's no risk of any tech company ruining them.
| xandrius wrote:
| I heard similar things about another American nonprofit and
| now I'm not so sure about it. When money and will comes
| along, loopholes come as well.
|
| So, I wouldn't be so sure, unfortunately.
| hbn wrote:
| Yes let's. But that doesn't answer my question.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I still remember the original announcement around LE and thought
| "Great idea, no idea if they'll be able to get buy-in from
| browsers/etc", now I use it on all my self-hosted sites and will
| probably be transitioning my employer over to it when we switch
| to automated renewal sometime next year.
|
| LE has been an amazing resource and every time I setup a new
| website and get a LE cert I smile. Especially after having
| lived/experienced the pain that was SSL/TLS before LE.
| hinkley wrote:
| The thing that has made me feel the oldest this week is that
| someone I used to mentor posted a holiday pictures with visible
| wrinkles. If people you think are young look old, then buddy,
| check the mirror.
|
| But this is a close second. 10 years? That can't be right. Even
| accounting for Covid Time Dialation.
| letsgetreal wrote:
| Let's Encrypt allows anyone to have secure https communication,
| sure, but it doesn't address the question of website
| authenticity. I groan when I'm on an e-commerce site and I click
| on the browser URL lock icon and see a Let's Encrypt certificate
| because frankly anyone can create one for no cost and I don't
| know if it's the real website or if I made a URL typo. Say what
| you will about the expensive cert providers, but it's reassuring
| when you see DigiCert or Sectigo - with a company name and the
| address of the head office.
| tptacek wrote:
| It was never a reasonable goal of the WebPKI to authenticate
| entities; only to help establish end-to-end encryption between
| unrelated parties on the Internet. The WebPKI can ensure you're
| talking to whoever controls `ycombinator.com`, but it has to be
| up to some other layer of the security stack to decide whether
| you _want_ to be talking to `ycombinator.com`. (This is in fact
| part of the logic behind FIDO2 and phishing-proof
| authentication).
| letsgetreal wrote:
| FIDO2 doesn't solve the first website contact trust problem -
| only the HTTPS certificate does that.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's good to want things!
| schoen wrote:
| > It was never a reasonable goal of the WebPKI to
| authenticate entities
|
| The confusing thing is that this goal nonetheless appeared in
| some original marketing and explanations about the web PKI
| from the late 1990s when it was first introduced. There was
| another smaller burst of this when people were arguing over
| the formalization of DV certificates and of Google's UI
| changes that stopped treating EV specially (as some people
| found both of those changes objectionable).
|
| I agree with you that the goal of authenticating entities was
| impractical, but the mental association and expectation
| around it still hasn't been completely dispelled. (I think I
| saw some form of this when doing support on the Let's Encrypt
| Community Forum, as people would sometimes complain that a
| site shouldn't have been allowed to have a certificate,
| either because it wasn't the organization they expected, or
| because it was malicious somehow.)
| tptacek wrote:
| Right, and when people who haven't paid that much attention
| to the machinations of the WebPKI (who could blame them)
| talk about how weird it is that the browsers killed EV,
| this is an important part of the backstory: EV was mostly a
| failed attempt to make the WebPKI do this kind of "do-what-
| I-mean" entity authentication.
|
| The problem as I see it is: there simply isn't one coherent
| global notion of what entity authentication means. It's
| situational.
| xandrius wrote:
| Not really the point of ssl certs though. And I'm pretty sure
| those limitations are the smallest hurdle, most people wouldn't
| even care checking.
| letsgetreal wrote:
| The "most people won't care argument" doesn't inspire
| confidence in the authenticity of the website.
|
| It's essentially a self-signed cert that anyone could make
| with the false security of a root certificate authority.
| pedrozieg wrote:
| 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."
| mmooss wrote:
| Another amazing success born at Mozilla:
|
| "The Let's Encrypt project was started in 2012 by two Mozilla
| employees, Josh Aas and Eric Rescorla, together with Peter
| Eckersley at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and J. Alex
| Halderman at the University of Michigan."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Encrypt
|
| What was Mozilla's role, beyond conception? Parenting? Care and
| feeding? A roof?
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