this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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105
Paid SSL vs Letsencrypt (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/selfhosted
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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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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

You're right, Google released their vision in 2023, here is what it says regarding lifespan:

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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).