
Leaving Beta, New Sponsors - dankohn1
https://letsencrypt.org//2016/04/12/leaving-beta-new-sponsors.html
======
K0nserv
Let's Encrypt might be one of the most important initiatives for a secure web.
I applaud all their great work.

The fact that they have chosen to reduce certificate lifetime in order to
encourage automation is a really big win for the security of the web as a
whole.

~~~
jaytaylor
The only hiccup I've run into is that if you run too many tests during
automation setup then they start denying further requests from you for weeks
or longer under "too many certificates issued for that domain".

~~~
pagwon
From [https://letsencrypt.org/getting-
started/](https://letsencrypt.org/getting-started/)

If you are trying out the client for the first time, you may want to use the
--test-cert flag, and a domain name that does not receive live traffic. This
will get certificates from our staging server. They won’t be valid in
browsers, but otherwise the process will be the same, so you can test a
variety of configuration options without hitting the rate limit.

~~~
crznp
It sounds like you are thinking of this being a tool for testing deployment
configuration, but I could also see using it for internal test environments.
The qc person adds the test CA to their browser, if they see "untrusted
connection" then something is wrong. Would that model be supported?

~~~
vertex-four
For internal test environments, you'd probably want to run your own ACME
server[0] and use certs from that if you can. Then you only need to trust your
internal CA that you can manager, rather than the test one that LetsEncrypt
offer.

[0]
[https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder](https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder)

------
claar
I assume "Leaving Beta" means their service as a whole is leaving beta, even
though their Github client is still Beta?

From
[https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt](https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt):

"The Let's Encrypt Client is BETA SOFTWARE. It contains plenty of bugs and
rough edges, and should be tested thoroughly in staging environments before
use on production systems."

And NGINX support is still labeled "highly experimental".

Not complaining though; these things take time. Thank you for bringing free
encryption to the masses, Let's Encrypt!

~~~
ran290
The client will be renamed and moved to the EFF soon:
[https://letsencrypt.org/2016/03/09/le-client-new-
home.html](https://letsencrypt.org/2016/03/09/le-client-new-home.html)

~~~
atonse
Any plans to make the official client based on Go? I wasn't too happy about
having to download a bunch of Python stuff on my server just to get an SSL
cert. Reminded me of the days of yore when you had to fiddle with Perl modules
just to run basic scripts.

~~~
Titanous
There are a bunch of great unofficial clients, several written in Go (I like
acmetool): [https://www.metachris.com/2015/12/comparison-of-10-acme-
lets...](https://www.metachris.com/2015/12/comparison-of-10-acme-lets-encrypt-
clients/)

~~~
tyho
Unfortunately lots of Go code on GitHub has significant oversights, this
included. I remember reporting a DoS bug in a different Go acme library
identical to this one I found in acmetool in less than 60s:

[https://github.com/hlandau/acme/blob/master/acmeapi/ocsp.go#...](https://github.com/hlandau/acme/blob/master/acmeapi/ocsp.go#L52)

In case it is not obvious, anyone in a privileged point on the network can
fill resb with enough data that the program panics due to OOM and crashes.
ioutil.ReadAll really needs a big warning in the docs because I have seen this
pattern far too often.

~~~
zachlatta
Yeah, serious +1 to this. I'm amazed by the usage of ioutil.ReadAll in popular
Go libraries and tools.

------
rythie
Full list of sponsors here:
[https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/](https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/)

Good to see most of them using HTTPS for their homepage. Though Cisco and
Gemalto don't yet.

~~~
bla2
No Apple or Microsoft. Are they opposed to this initiative? Do they think it's
not important?

~~~
odbol_
Apple don't give money to no one. Possibly the least altruistic company ever,
which is disgraceful considering they're also the wealthiest.

~~~
johncolanduoni
Steve Jobs was pretty publicly opposed to donating to charity, but he's been
gone for a while. If you Google "Apple Donations" you'll find a whole slew of
articles detailing some of the contributions they have made since Tim Cook
took the reins. For example, they match employee donations both in money and
time.

~~~
halviti
Tim Cook exposes the lie that Steve Jobs ignored philanthropy

[http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/02/02/tim_cook_exposes_t...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/02/02/tim_cook_exposes_the_lie_that_steve_jobs_ignored_philanthropy_)

------
toomuchtodo
What can we as a community do to ensure the long term financial health of
Let's Encrypt?

EDIT: Any chance Let's Encrypt (or the underlying 501c3) could obtain
cybersecurity grants from the US government?

~~~
ruffrey
Donate!

~~~
jasonkostempski
I don't know how much it helps but if you shop on Amazon, EFF is a sponsor of
LE and EFF is an option for Amazon Smile. Tricky part is remembering to use
smile.amazon.com instead of www but Amazon has started reminding users to go
there and there's also browser plugins to force it to go there.

~~~
chime
I wish Amazon would just forward to smile.amazon.com instead.

~~~
ianlevesque
They want to support charity, but not too much.

------
ruffrey
The node/express middleware works flawlessly for me. I am really stoked that
Let's Encrypt is happening.

Writing multi-microservice apps in Node just got a lot easier to deploy for my
side projects and small consulting clients - as well as cheaper. Of course
it's safer, you never have to think twice about doing TLS.

That said, I'd still opt for a wildcard certificate for anything enterprisey.

Thank you to all the people who worked for years to make it happen.

~~~
pfg
> That said, I'd still opt for a wildcard certificate for anything
> enterprisey.

Many sites use wildcard certs because they're the simplest way of getting SSL
for your entire domain. There is one huge problem with that, though: Sharing
the private key between different services means that the security of your
private key is only as good as the weakest link. If any of your services
suffer a compromise that leads to a private key leak (i.e. Heartbleed), all
your other services are now vulnerable to MitM as well. Not just that, but
weaknesses in your TLS configuration on one service could have implications on
other services as well, as demonstrated by the DROWN attack.

That is not to say that there are no valid use-cases for wildcard
certificates. If you're, for example, hosting a SaaS where each customer gets
a custom subdomain, but the infrastructure behind each subdomain is
essentially the same, there's no additional risk and wildcards are the perfect
solution. If you're just getting a wildcard certificate because it's the most
convenient solution, however, you're probably weakening some of your
infrastructure in exchange for that.

~~~
avar
You seem to be assuming that there needs to be a distinctive backend codebase
for each domain covering the wildcard certificate.

This is something entirely orthogonal to the number of certificates. You could
have 1000 codebases with different attack vectors under one SSL certificate,
or 1 codebase the same attack vectors serving up 1000 SSL certificates.

~~~
pfg
I'm not sure I follow?

What I was trying to say was that it's a good idea to have one key per
DISTINCT($attack_surface), which includes anything from physical security to
the software stack, in order to limit the damage during a compromise. Throwing
wildcards at everything tends to go against that principle, even though I
admit there are use-cases where wildcards are entirely appropriate (namely
those where each subdomain has the exact same attack surface anyway), and
using something else isn't worth the trouble.

------
nachtigall
Mozilla on this: [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/04/12/mozilla-
supported-l...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/04/12/mozilla-supported-
lets-encrypt-goes-out-of-beta/)

------
jlgaddis
I really really wish there was a client with decent support for using DNS-
based verification, mainly so that I can generate certificates for mail
servers (since they don't run a local httpd on the same machine).

Even if it was just spitting out a string that I needed to add/edit in my zone
files (self-hosted DNS) every ~90 days, I'd be fine with that.

I haven't had much luck finding clients w/ support for this. I did find one
that supported using Route 53, etc., via the APIs, but that didn't help me
any.

If anyone is working on something like this, I'd be happy to throw a few
dollars their way.

~~~
pfg
Take a look at any of the three bash clients listed here[1].

[1]:
[https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt/wiki/Links#bash](https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt/wiki/Links#bash)

------
lazyjones
What's the plan if LE ever goes down / commercial / rogue? Millions of sites
will have to get new certs manually within 90 days or less or they will all
break. Wouldn't it be healthier if LE had some "competition" with compatible
protocols as backup?

~~~
pfg
Let's Encrypt is actually an implementation of the ACME (Automated Certificate
Management Environment) specification, developed by the IETF[1]. The goal is
to get other CAs to adopt the standard as well.

In the meantime, other CAs are starting to offer free DV certs (Symantec being
the most recent example), although there's no word yet on ACME compatibility.

------
diegorbaquero
I would like to thank LE and its sponsor for disrupting https and doing a
great job. I love it.

------
mvitorino
Can someone clarify something for me please:

"1.7 million certificates for more than 3.8 million websites"

How is this possible if they (AFAIK) don't issue wildcard?

~~~
mikecb
They do do SAN.

~~~
nxzero
Subject Alternative Name (SAN) and photo showing a SAN on a CERT:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubjectAltName](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubjectAltName)

------
neovive
Great News! I've been using Let's Encrypt through Laravel Forge and it's far
and away the best experience I've had with SSL. Let's Encrypt is great for all
web developers and end users.

------
azdle
Anyone know what, if anything, this means for the rate limits on issuing certs
on a given domain? That was the one thing that was stopping us from making SSL
completely automatic on our customer's domains.

~~~
mholt
They recently raised the rate limit on certificates per domain per week from 5
to 20. [https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/rate-limits-for-lets-
enc...](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/rate-limits-for-lets-
encrypt/6769/2?u=mholt)

~~~
joshmoz
It's also worth pointing out that you can have up to 100 SANs in a
certificate, so you can technically issue for up to 20x100 (2000) subdomains
per week.

~~~
shawabawa3
When I hit a rate limit on sub1.example.com, it let me create a certificate
with a SAN for sub1.example.com and sub2.example.com

So I think it's actually essentially unlimited, you just can't request _the
exact same_ certificate more than 20 times per week

~~~
nsgi
There are separate rate limits for FQDNs and domain names. The former is 5,
the latter is 20.

------
kyledrake
Please add wildcard support.

~~~
Osiris
They don't support wildcard, but they do support alternate names, so you can
have multiple domains on the same cert. I know it's not the same, but if you
have a known list of subdomains, you could still use it.

~~~
kyledrake
I have a list of 75,800 subdomains on one of my sites, several hundred
sometimes added in the course of a day. On my IPFS HSHCA subdomain CORS proxy,
I have ∞. It's not mechanically sensical to just sit there banging on a
centralized server all day to get an updated certificate.

Wildcard certs start at $100/yr (for -the- cheapest) and go quickly up from
there.

Many people are not using SSL for many use cases because of this, and that's
bad. Why leave them out in the cold for doing things like enforcing CORS
security?

It's mind boggling to me that they could leave them out of the final product.

~~~
pfg
Out of curiosity, have you thought about registering neocities.org as a Public
Suffix? Aside from bypassing the rate limits, neocities.org seems like it
would belong on the list, given that you're (more or less) delegating control
over subdomains to other parties. The PSL has implications for cookie scope as
well (which might or might not be a concern for you).

I would very much like to see wildcard support in ACME and hope that Let's
Encrypt will adopt it eventually (although I think clients should offer it as
an opt-in, as not to encourage practices which are bad for security), and I
think that both of your examples are a good fit for wildcard certificates. I'd
probably still stick with a regular wildcard as well - $100/yr vs. managing
~1k+ SAN certificates sounds like a bad trade-off - but I thought I'd mention
it anyway.

~~~
kyledrake
Oh wow, I had no idea public suffix was a thing. I'll definitely check it out,
thank you.

------
Sephr
If you wish to allow the creation of subdomains by users, or if you
dynamically handle unlimited subdomains for any purpose, then Let's Encrypt
won't be able to help you just yet. Luckily, wildcard support is at least
planned, so these use cases will eventually be supported in the future.

I've been using Let's Encrypt for my personal blog and I definitely appreciate
the free security that is does offer, even without wildcard certificates.

~~~
jlgaddis
So, they've solved a major problem... but not _your_ problem?

Honestly, wildcart certs would make my job a lot easier too, but with
automatic renewal I'm more than happy to deal with multiple certs and stop
giving the commercial CAs my money.

------
betadreamer
I want to use LE for my side project that I host on GAE. Does anyone have a
good tip on this? Also do I have to manually renew it every 3 months?

------
yeukhon
I would love to use LE but I can't because my use case is all about internal
network. I don't want self-signed cert. I want to leverage internal domain
system, especially the ones with IPs. While I understand the design of LE
would not encourage any of the above, I do hope one day LE has a solution to
end the pain of self-signed cert (without modifying host CA file).

~~~
pfg
If your internal domain is also a public (ICANN) domain, you can use DNS-based
validation to get a certificate. Basically, you create a TXT record with a
challenge token and make sure Let's Encrypt can resolve that record. Your
actual internal domains don't have to be publicly resolvable or routable for
that to work.

This is still a WIP in the official client, but there are a number of other
clients with dns-01 support[1].

Publicly trusted CAs are not allowed to issue certificates for internal
domains (i.e. made-up names which don't end with an ICANN TLD.)

[1]:
[https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt/wiki/Links#bash](https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt/wiki/Links#bash)

------
ryandrake
Besides the automation features, what's the difference between these guys and,
say, StartSSL, who also provide free SSL certificates? If I only have one or
two personal domains for toy projects, why would I switch?

~~~
deepsun
Let's Encrypt certificates quality is better: Grade A [1] versus Grade A- for
StartSSL [2].

I personally like who's behind it. AFAIK, Let's Encrypt started with EFF
sponsorship, later came Google, Mozilla, Facebook, now Cisco, Akamai, HP.

Probably there are other differences, would be glad to know.

[1]
[https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=helloworld.le...](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=helloworld.letsencrypt.org)

[2]
[https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.startssl....](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.startssl.com)

~~~
pfg
That grade is actually mostly about your TLS configuration (available cipher
suites, etc.), and not about the certificate. Aside from some major no-goes
(like SHA-1 certificates), TLS security is about server configuration;
certificates are relatively straightforward in that respect.

It's true that they embrace a lot of best practices, like short certificate
lifetimes, automation, logging all certificates to CT log servers (which
StartSSL started doing quite recently as well), etc. The client also helps
with securing your TLS configuration, among other things.

------
aresant
Randomly who designed the website @
[https://letsencrypt.org/](https://letsencrypt.org/) ?

I love the landing page, it's clean, well organized and simple.

------
giancarlostoro
I wonder if NameCheap will ever offer this to customers, I guess it would take
out from their profits if they did considering they sell SSL tickets, but I
never bought a ticket from them, and unless I absolutely have to / am being
paid to I wouldn't bother doing so either way. If domain registrars push this
it could raise more awareness, that and web hosts elsewhere. I wonder how
DigitalOcean can aid in this endeavour as well (LEMP / LAMP images with LE
integreated as an option?).

~~~
noahbradley
I was pleased to see Dreamhost (who I use) offering free Let's Encrypt for any
domain bought/hosted with them. Quick & easy setup. Would love to see other
registrars/hosts do the same.

------
thisrod
I'm confused.

The web has a new server. If I trick the server into thinking that stuff I
write gets hosted on example.com, it will generate a certificate asserting
that I have a right to post stuff on example.com. It's easy for me to get that
certificate revoked, but hard for the legitimate owners of example.com to do
so.

Comparing this to self-signed certificates, I can think of a bunch of
drawbacks, but I can't see any advantage. I hope I'm missing something.

~~~
an_ko
Part of getting a certificate from Let's Encrypt involves getting a file from
them that you then serve from a certain URL on your domain. Someone without
enough control over your server to be able to do that won't be able to issue a
certificate for it. This is called a "domain-validated" certificate.

It's not self-signed: Let's Encrypt is a certificate authority, which signs
the certificates it issues.

~~~
mastax
I think their point is that any connection that LE makes to example.com in
order to verify ownership will be insecure and thus vulnerable to MITM.

Not a problem specific to LE, but to any DV cert.

------
vox_mollis
Reminder to the LE site maintainer folks:

[http://i.imgur.com/jvp6a8M.png](http://i.imgur.com/jvp6a8M.png)

Open Sans does not render very well on some platform combinations.

Edit: I should say your specific version of Open Sans. Your 14272-byte version
of OpenSans-Regular.woff renders like this, whereas other sites' 21956-byte
version renders fine.

~~~
scrollaway
If you can't rely on a platform/browser to properly render a font as popular
as Open Sans, it's really not worth working around it... I run firefox on
Linux as well and don't have any issues. It's very likely on your end
somewhere.

Edit: Do you get the same issue on [https://leclan.ch/](https://leclan.ch/) ?

~~~
vox_mollis
Interestingly enough, leclan.ch renders fine on my local system.

Edit: HN's VPN endpoint hatred is preventing me from replying, so I'll post
here as an edit:

Not likely eot/svg. You and LE are both serving me OpenSans-Regular.woff -
yours is 21956 bytes, and theirs is 14272 bytes.

~~~
scrollaway
I'm using open sans (locally hosted as woff) on that site so i'd say it's
unlikely to do with the font itself. Maybe your browser has issues with
eot/svg fonts.

Could likely be something to do with fontconfig on your system.

------
__david__
Does "leaving beta" mean that any API limits have been increased? The 7 certs
per domain per week thing is kind of a pain…

~~~
greggman
What does this mean to you? Note this is an honest question. Does it mean
you're rebuilding your server from scratch and therefore requesting a new key
each time for the same domain? Or does it mean something else?

I wonder if anyone has created a simple middle service that can locally cache
the certs so you talk to the cache server?

~~~
__david__
When I was first testing out my automation I was using real keys instead of
the staging server, so every time I tested I was eating up a cert.

In the end though, I have more than 7 certs for my main domain--With a bunch
of services built up over the years, I have roughly 14 or 15 certs (so it took
me 3 weeks to get all my certs created). Subdomains count against your domain
limit, so "mail.example.com", "blog.example.com", and "www.example.com" count
as 3 certs for "example.com".

~~~
greggman
Are you 100% sure subdomains count against your limit? I just asked that
question on letsencrypt recently and was told there is no limit to subdomains.

------
yexponential
This is awesome news.

Should we be worried that LE is sponsored by the big players (cisco et al.)

Not implying that we should. Just genuinely wondering if we should be wary or
if it means anything at all, for the future of LE I mean.

ps:might be my misunderstanding as im not sure what sponsored actually
entails.

~~~
jedisct1
Having Cisco onboard is scary, but it doesn't imply that backdoors have been
added to LE. Sponsors only give money to support LE development and
infrastructure.

~~~
joering2
hmm sponsors not "only give money"... they usually expect something in return
- which is understandable.

To me this is a deal-breaker. Cisco did so many bad things in the past in
terms of privacy that the only good news is that now I know to stay away from
LetsEncrypt.

~~~
pfg
Could you elaborate on how Cisco being a sponsor affects your trust in Let's
Encrypt? It's in the nature of the CA system that it's only as strong as its
weakest link, and there are dozens if not hundreds of CAs of questionable
trust.

This seems like a conceptual misunderstanding of how TLS works. Let's Encrypt
does not have access to your private key and does not have the ability to
decrypt your traffic. They put a stamp on your certificate saying "Yep, this
key belongs to this domain" \- that's it.

~~~
count
Hypothetically, the risk could be that LE is now a trusted CA, Cisco could
pressure to get a signed, trusted cert for anything.

I don't think that's realistic, but if we're talking conspiracy theories...

------
CephalopodMD
Does this mean anything for developers? Like, do I have to change anything to
keep using LE?

~~~
joshmoz
You don't have to change anything.

------
qewrffewqwfqew
Came here to complain about the HN title which tells me nothing about why I
might care to read the OP.

Noticed the domain, now glad to know.

The title could do with a fixup though - my RSS reader doesn't show the target
domain.

------
lisper
Does this mean that the 5 cert/domain/week limit is being lifted?

~~~
pfg
It's been changed to 20 per domain (and 5 per identical FQDN set, i.e.
certificates that are exactly the same) recently.

------
Scirra_Tom
Been using ReliableSite.net for years for our hosting, brilliant company and
will always recommend them. What a pleasant surprise to see them as a new
sponsor!

------
madetech
This is fantastic news well done Let's Encrypt.

------
gabamnml
Wow! Awesome news. Good job guys. We all have the right to be a little safer.
It is running out the vile business of certificates.

------
oldgun
Hats off to all the people who contributed to LetsEncrypt. Your work has
brought web security to the next level.

------
djhworld
I use LE to secure my rasperry pi at home, accessible via a domain.

\+ client side certs.

Really easy to setup, thanks for all your efforts!

~~~
daptaq
Dynamic or Static DNS? I've currently got a Pi running my site, but haven't
bothered with setting https up. Probably also because it seems a bit more
complicated if you use a non-standard web server (in my case thttpd). But on
the other hand, I baerly looked into it at all.

~~~
djhworld
Dynamic, I use Amazon Route53 to manage the DNS, and have a script that checks
my public IP every 15 minutes, if it's != the one it has seen before, it
updates Amazon Route53 to the new IP.

In terms of setting up HTTPS, I use nginx.

------
ing33k
just installed a certificate yesterday and felt happy as I didn't had to wait
for hours to get a certificated via email.

------
farrokhi
I wish their client had first class support for other operating systems like
FreeBSD. Current client is too debian/ubuntu specific.

~~~
_wmd
Which part of [https://www.eriklundblad.com/log/post/lets-encrypt-on-
freebs...](https://www.eriklundblad.com/log/post/lets-encrypt-on-freebsd/) is
hard?

~~~
jrapdx3
Actually, setting up LE on FBSD was even easier than that. We've had LE
working on two of our FBSD servers for 4 months. Running the py27-letsencrypt
client with --certonly and -d domainname -d ..., installed the certs in
/usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/live/<domain>/...

Then pointing nginx to the "live" cert location and setting a cron job to
renew every 4 weeks or so pretty much takes care of the whole process. I
notice the FBSD LE client was just upgraded, not sure what new features it
offers, but certainly should work at least as well as before.

------
cyphar
I'm incredibly happy that boulder is under the MPL. Not enough new software is
copyleft these days.

------
blakeyrat
Leaving beta? They don't even have a Windows/IIS client yet. They're nowhere
close to "release quality".

~~~
wtetzner
Sure they are. They're a CA, the clients are just for users' convenience.
Anyone who wants to can write their own client against the LE rest API.

~~~
blakeyrat
I disagree. When you go to the webpage linked above and hit "getting started",
there's not even a _hint_ that their system works in OSes other than Linux.

Possible there is support for Windows and IIS, but _their own website_
strongly suggests otherwise.

EDIT: if they consider their client and their CA as two different products,
well, right now the website conflates the two badly. And there's absolutely
nothing there to suggest it supports Windows/IIS.

~~~
wtetzner
> here's not even a hint that their system works in OSes other than Linux.

> And there's absolutely nothing there to suggest it supports Windows/IIS.

Their "system" is an API for issuing certificates. There's nothing platform
specific about that.

> right now the website conflates the two badly.

From [https://letsencrypt.org/getting-
started/](https://letsencrypt.org/getting-started/): You’re welcome to use any
compatible client, but we only provide instructions for using the client that
we provide.

Edit: This is the protocol they use: [https://github.com/letsencrypt/acme-
spec](https://github.com/letsencrypt/acme-spec)

I found the link here: [https://letsencrypt.org/how-it-
works/](https://letsencrypt.org/how-it-works/)

~~~
blakeyrat
So what part of this is going out of beta? The protocol, the CA, or the
client?

Now I'm just confused.

But I still say: if their mission is to make it as easy as possible to install
a SSL cert on any website, as long as they don't have any (apparent) support
for Windows/IIS, they're a long, long, long way away from fulfilling that
mission and probably shouldn't be leaving beta.

~~~
cbr
Typically beta/stable is about stability, not about features or platform
support.

