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?
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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).
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.
Why?
Let’s encrypt is free and secure. There is no good reason not to use it.
I think their question is, what do you mean by “secure”? Because as the saying goes for internet services: usually, if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
Let’s Encrypt is a non profit largely started by the Electronic freedom foundation (eff) to bring https to the internet. Before it was very trivial to spy and modify web traffic but now that https is everywhere it is much harder to do if not impossible. They are also the ones who pushed for all major browsers to adopt https only. In all major browsers you should get a page warning you that a site uses http instead of https. It is a very bad idea to use http in 2024 as it allows anyone along the line to modify traffic and to see what pages you are viewing.
I still use http a lot for internal stuff running in my own network. There’s no spying there… I hope … And ssl for local network only services is a total pita.
So I really hope browsers won’t adapt https only
Certain unnamed companies coughgoogle doesn’t like to trust Let Encrypt its definitely not an abuse of an illegal monopoly they have good reasons I promise.
But the whole point behind using a signed certificate is that other people can look at you and immediately know you are who you say you are if a company doesn’t trust you it doesn’t really matter what the motivation is you might as well use a self signed certificate.
Paid certificates have the money to make sure everyone trusts them and has a reputation to maintain so are more likely to defend a legitimate complaint.
99.999% of individuals it simply doesn’t matter(although you might have to look into it if you’re using android apps) but to a company the little bit that certification costs is worth every penny.
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 CF CloudFlare DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web HTTPS HTTP over SSL IP Internet Protocol SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL nginx Popular HTTP server
9 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 18 acronyms.
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I’ve used Lets Encrypt for years and years, in fact it’s been at least 6?. LE with the encryptbot?, automate the entire process, and then completely forget about it until someone posts on Lemmy asking about it.
It’s been long enough I’ve forgotten the proper names of the software and I would have to go back through my notes to recreate it.
Just checked the logs and it’s fine.
Don’t pay for shit.
The main benefits to paying for certs are
- as many said, getting more than 90 days validity for certs that are harder to rotate, or the automation hasn’t been done.
- higher rate limits for issuing and renewing certs, you can ask letsencrypt to up limits, but you can still hit them.
- you can get certs for things other than web sites, ie code signing.
The only thing that matters to most people is that they don’t get cert errors going to/using a web site, or installing software. Any CA that is in the browsers, OS and various language trust stores is the same to that effect.
The rules for inclusion in the browsers trust stores are strict (many of the Linux distros and language trust stores just use the Mozilla cert set), which is where the trust comes from.
Which CA provider you choose doesn’t change your potential attack surface. The question on attack surface seems like it might come from lacking understanding of how certs and signing work.
A cert has 2 parts public cert and private key, CAs sign your sites public cert with their private key, they never have or need your private key. Public certs can be used to verify something was signed by the private key. Public certs can be used to encrypt data such that only the private key can decrypt it.
OP’s security concern is valid. Different CAs may differ in the challenges used to verify you to be the domain owner. Using something that you could crack may lead to an attacker’s public key being certified instead.
This could for example be the case with HTTPS verification (place a file with a specific content accessible through your URL) if the website has lacking input sanitization and/or creates files with the user’s input at an unfortunate location that collides with the challenge.
This attack vector might be far-fetched, but there can certainly be differences between different signing authorities.
But even if you use GoMommy extra super duper triple snake oil security checked ssl cert, if I trick LetsEncrypt to sign a key for that domain I still have a valid cert for your site.
You’re right, my bad.
If you are just self hosting for your own use, just stick with letsencrypt or self signed certificates.
The paid certificates are for businesses where the users need to trust the certificate. They usually come with warranties and identity verification, which is important if you are accepting payments through your website, but it’s just a waste of money for personal use.
There is really no reason to use self-signed anymore. I use Let’s Encrypt even for 10.0.0.0/8 addresses.
Except for the learning process and if you want your self-signed local domains in your lan !
https://jellyfin.homelab.domainis easier to access than IP addresses.I’ve been doing home networking for many years now and the public Domain + Cloudflare DNS + Let’s Encrypt is the easiest it’s ever been.
Can’t argue against that.
However, I prefer local domain names accessible via Wireguard with self-signed certs. I like to understand how everything works under the hood !
Also, I’m broke AF and buying a domain name (even cheap ones) are out of my budget :(.
Numeric .xyz domains only cost $1 a year. They’re not great for things like mail because they’re often used by spammers (probably because of the price), but it’s great for cheap signed DNS hostnames.
I point it to the server on my local network and use Wireguard to connect myself.
In that case, i recommend step-ca, which is a certificate authority server with acme support anyone can self host. The setup took a while but it’s been running for months now without problems for me.
Yeaaah I already played a bit arround with step-ca ! Right now a make a mini-CA with openssl.
When I get more comfortable with how everything works together I will surely give step-ca another try.
I found open-ssl to be much harder to use. Do you just manually make new certificates with the CA in CLI?
