this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Certbot is great. Let's Encrypt is great. (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by thirdBreakfast to c/selfhosted
54 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I've been downloading SSL certificates from my domain provider, using cat to join them together to make the fullchain.pem, uploading them to the server, and myself adding a 90 day calendar reminder. Every time I did this I'd think I should find out about this Certbot thing.

Well, I finally got around to it, and it was one of those jobs which turns out to be so easy you wish you'd done it ages ago.

The install was simple (I'm using nginx/ubuntu).

It scans up your server conf files to see which sites are being served, asks you a couple of questions, obtains the Let's Encrypt certificate for them, installs it, updates your conf files to use it, and sets up a cron job to check if it's time to renew the certificate, which it will also do auto-magically.

I was so pleased with it I made a donation to the EFF for it, then I started to think about how amazingly useful Let's Encrypt is, and gave them one too. It's just a really good time to be in this hobby.

I highly recommend Certbot. If you've been putting this off, or only just hearing about it, make some time for it.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You know what, thanks for making this post. I have used Letsencrypt and Certbot for years now, i'd never have thought about donating, but since you said that I just made a donation.

[–] thirdBreakfast 7 points 10 months ago

Good on you. For anyone else inspired, you can support Certbot here, and Let's Encrypt here.

I promise I don't work for them - I was just struck by how phenomenally handy they are.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago

Certbot is great when using Nginx (or Apache2), but if you can use a different engine. Its worthwhile checking out Caddy!

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
DNS Domain Name Service/System
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
IP Internet Protocol
LXC Linux Containers
PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL
VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
nginx Popular HTTP server

7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.

[Thread #120 for this sub, first seen 8th Sep 2023, 16:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

If you like certbot, you should check out Caddy. Fully auto tls so long as the server resolves to a set domain name. Caddy-docker-proxy is pure magic with docker containers.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I run all of my containerised services behind Traefik which does LetsEncrypt for me as well as handles fun stuff like routing to different containers / reverse proxy. It's fantastic if you want to take your new knowledge to the next level!

[–] thirdBreakfast 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thanks, I do, and I've added a couple from the suggestions here. Caddy and Traefik are both on my list of things to investigate now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Here's my config to get you started, I've got a bunch of services configured to work with it on my GitLab, too!

https://gitlab.com/Matt.Jolly/traefik-grafana-prometheus-docker

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (4 children)

I'm obviously a fan of LE but a simple self-hosted option with a custom CA would be great for local machines:

  • I don't want every Raspberry Pi/laptop/temp VM/whatever published into the cert transparency record
  • Configuring the router to forward every local hostname to the machine's .well-known would be awful (if my ISP even allowed port 80)
  • Exposing local machines to the Internet is an unnecessary degradation of security
[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Use DNS verification and wildcard certs and all this goes away.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

+1

I use acme-dns and it works very well. It's a basic DNS server that only serves the Let's Encrypt DNS challenges - it only allows clients to create TXT records, in the exact format that Let's Encrypt needs. This is great for security as you don't have to give Certbot/whatever full access to your main DNS servers.

Let's Encrypt followers CNAMEs which is how this works - you CNAME the _acme-challenge subdomain to point to a subdomain hosted by the acme-dns server.

Let's Encrypt is fine with IPv6-only DNS servers, so I have acme-dns running on one of my VPSes only over IPv6 (since I'm using the IPv4 for my regular DNS server). Good VPS providers provide a /64 IPv6 range.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

In theory you could generate a wildcard to a domain then use it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

It's easy* to setup Hashicorp Vault with your own CA and do automated cert generation and rotation, if you are willing to integrate everything into Vault and install your root CA everywhere. (*not really harder than any other Vault setup, but yaknow). I may go down this route eventually since I don't think a device I don't control has ever accessed anything I selfhost, or ever will.

I have a wildcard subdomain pointing to my public IP, and forward port 80 to an LXC container with certbot. Port 80 appears closed outside the brief window when certbot is renewing certs. Inside my network I have my PiHole configured to return the local IP for each service.

Nothing exposed to the internet at all. There is a record of my hostnames on Let's Encrypt but not concerned if someone will, say, deduce apollo-idrac is the iDRAC service for a Dell rackmount server called apollo and the other Greek/Roman gods are VMs on it. Seemed like a house of cards that would never work reliably, but three odd years later I only have issues if a DNS resolver insists on bypassing my PiHole. And that DNS resolver is SystemD-ResolveD which should crawl back into whatever hellhole it came out of.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

I love the docker / traefik setup we have at work. We get tls certified domains for any docker container we run with just a few lines of yml. I can spin up a site in seconds.

[–] vegetaaaaaaa 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Wait until you hear about mod_md

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Wait till you guys use cert-manager on a kubernetes cluster

[–] SheeEttin 14 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Wait until you stand up your own CA and issue certs with multi-year validity so they don't have to be renewed more often than you rebuild everything anyway

At least until you try to access stuff on a Pixel phone which doesn't let you install CA certs any more 😞

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Having certificates that are valid for over a year is contra-productive, as when they get in to the wrong hands they might still be valid for a year until they naturally run out of time. The reason LetsEncrypt issues only 90d valid certificates is not to annoy you, but save your ass once someone obtains your certificates.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

Which they will, because we are all bad at security.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

While shorter lived certs certainly improve the general security, certificate revocation lists are what you need if a cert gets compromised.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

They don’t work in practice, no modern browser actively queries any revocation DBs. It’s just much more efficient to let something expire sooner than keep track of all lost somethings.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Wait until you set up cert-manager to issue both Let's Encrypt certificates, as well as generating your own CA and issuing certs from your own CA where you can set the validity however want.

[–] StefanT 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I had no problem to install my CA on my Pixel (Android 13). I read that this was not possible for some time but Google changed it.

[–] LufyCZ 1 points 10 months ago

I've heard something about it changing with A14

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[–] MashedTech 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yes it is, I love using cert-manager on my list cluster.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Just setup cert-manager for a client at our work thats moving to a Kubernetes cluster. Setup the ACME issuer using DNS Cloudflare challenges, its awesome how simple it is to even get internal hostnames with certs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Downloading certificates from your domain provider is often a security problem. Only you are supposed to know your private keys.

[–] SheeEttin 31 points 10 months ago

You're supposed to upload the CSR, not the key.

But yeah, if they do all the generation themselves, they also have the private key and could easily break into anything the cert is used for.

[–] thirdBreakfast 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Good point. Although they are also hosting my DNS, so they can take the site over anytime they want anyway?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

They could hijack your site at any time, but with a copy of your live private certs they (or more likely whatever third party that will invariably breach your domain provider) can decrypt your otherwise secure traffic.

I don't think there's significant real tangible risk since who cares about your private selfhosted services and I'd be more worried about the domain being hijacked, and really any sort of network breach is probably interested in finding delicious credit card numbers and passwords and crypto private keys to munch on. If someone got into my network, spying on my Jellyfin streaming isn't what I'm going to be worried about.

But it is why CSRs are used.

[–] thirdBreakfast 2 points 10 months ago

Thanks - I hadn't considered the traffic decryption.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Is it possible to change the elliptic curve yet or does it still throw suspicious errors

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