Let's Encrypt [LWN.net]

Let's Encrypt

Posted Mar 6, 2016 14:41 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
Parent article: TLS certificate management on Android

"In some cases, the operator of a web site may just not want to deal with the trouble and expense of getting a recognized certificate"

This case shouldn't be any trouble or expense now, because we have Let's Encrypt. Indeed having Let's Encrypt allowed me to remove the CA cert I'd manually generated and installed on my personal Android devices to protect my own sites.

For example, I have some sites hosted by Dreamhost, a cheap virtual hosting provider. I can click "Secure Hosting", click on a site, check the box saying I'll use Let's Encrypt thanks, agree to the T&C box and I'm done. Dreamhost sort everything out. It's actually a LOT easier than setting up my own CA was. Maybe 5 seconds per domain once, versus an hour for setup, plus 5 minutes per domain every year.

It's true that _some_ web hosts don't offer Let's Encrypt, preferring instead of hawk an affiliated CA's products. Some still, in 2016, won't let you use SSL with their virtual hosting at all because they're worried your customers on Internet Explorer for Windows XP will be confused (it does seem likely that customers using Windows XP are confused, I'd be confused if I was stuck with Windows XP in 2016) but these are problems with a provider, and I think we can expect them to dwindle away.

CT logs allow us to see that Let's Encrypt is now issuing more certificates than the entire for-profit Certificate Authority market. They also, perhaps not coincidentally allow us to see that Let's Encrypt are one of the few big CAs whose certificates aren't riddled with technical mistakes, CABforum compliance errors and other things you'd like to think a "professional" outfit wouldn't let out the door‡. Turns out that to issue tens of thousands of certificates every day fully automatically you have to get rid of steps like "manually transcribe information from this field into this other field" that cause the for-profit CAs to constantly screw stuff up.

‡ Recently CABforum voted on whether the CAs ought to report "mis-issuance" publicly. This would include both the sort of technical errors I alluded to above, and numerous other types of mistake. The browser vendors voted "Yes", the CAs voted "No" (or in some cases abstained) and so the proposal was dead. Turns out if you constantly screw up it's way easier to just not tell anybody than to investigate why you keep screwing up. Huh.

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Let's Encrypt

Posted Mar 8, 2016 7:04 UTC (Tue) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (1 responses)

> Turns out if you constantly screw up it's way easier to just not tell anybody than to investigate why you keep screwing up. Huh.

Huh indeed. There are some industries where safety is so critical that they voluntarily adopted disclusure policies stating that if you disclose your failures, nobody wll blame you for them. Aviation industry is one of those, I think. Turns out that this makes everyone safer and, notably, it does *not* reduce public trust in the industry. Quite the contrary in fact. Will the CAs see the light eventually? Who knows?...

Let's Encrypt

Posted Mar 9, 2016 16:20 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

For the CAs the situation with web browsers is a bit weird. I wrote a long thing here originally but here's the short version:

CAs existed before the World Wide Web, and when SSL was invented and they were given a role on the Web they probably expected to outlive it. So CA roots aren't, as we might think of them today, the root of a hierarchy filled entirely with stuff about web sites. Instead along with the millions of web sites are VISA payment terminals, Exchange mail servers, Government tax IDs, Pay-per-view movie systems for Cable TV, and so on. Today it seems crazy to put all this stuff in one hierarchy, but that situation sneaked up on them and so far we're stuck with it, mostly with negative consequences.

I think we're at a turning point right about now, for a number of reasons which I'll list below, which means we might see some hard choices actually made and stop kicking some of the security cans down the road.

* The trust / don't trust / kinda-sorta-trust metrics (and less importantly UI) in browsers have become more sophisticated, offering a middle ground where you can threaten to mark a CA's certificates as less trusted than its competitors without causing a tidal wave of user dissatisfaction. Google have already done this for EV for example. If your CA doesn't obey Google's extra rules for EV your EV certs still work as SSL certs, but they don't give the EV "green bar" effect in Chrome.

* Sunlight. CA/Browser forum was originally a darkened room affair. Almost all business now (since mid-2012) takes place in public, and anything which is done privately has to be ratified in public, giving anybody who'd rather it hadn't happened in the dark an opportunity to up-end the can of worms and force it to be re-examined in the light.

* Let's Encrypt. Previously the for-profit CAs made up such an overwhelming majority of all certificates issued that if they stood together the browser vendors had no option but to put up with whatever they offered. But since late-2015 there's a non-profit that could take up a lot of the slack overnight. Abolishing for-profit CAs isn't on the roadmap, but for-profit CAs can no longer just insist it's their way or the highway.