What is the use case or benefit for the server admin?
as a server admin I wouldn't want to keep renewing my cert.
can anyone help to explain?
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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Lets Encrypt certs tend to be renewed by a cronjob, anyway. The advantage is that if someone gets your cert without your knowledge, they have, at most, six days to make use of it.
If they get it without your knowledge, what are the odds they can get the new one too?
If they got it with your knowledge, can't you just revoke the old one?
If they got it with your knowledge, can’t you just revoke the old one?
Yeah, but unfortunately cert revocation isn't that great in practice. Lots of devices and services don't even check the revocation lists on every connection.
6 days to do what you want to do to the page and its visitors. I guess that's good?
It would be six days at max, assuming they managed to steal the certificate immediately after it was issued, otherwise it's gonna be even less.
Having the certificate doesn't automatically mean you can change the site, if you have control of the site hosting you likely wouldn't need to steal the cert anyway.
Stealing the certificate would allow you to run a man in the middle type attack but that's inevitably going to be very limited in scope. The shorter time limit on the cert reduces that scope even further, which is great.
Since most Let's Encrypt certs will have an automated renewal process this doesn't even really change the overhead of setup so I think this move makes a lot of sense.
There are other things certificates can be used for as well of course but I'm just going off your example.
I've been using the Swiss Cheese Model for my sandwiches and they've been a disaster.
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Since I set up a https website (lemmy) and had to deal with the hassle of certificates, I do wonder why you need another entity to churn out what's basically a RSA key pair?
Is it this you must trust the government again or is there some better reasons for it?
It's to make sure you're actually reaching your intended endpoint. If I'm visiting a site for the first time, how do I know I actually have THEIR certificate? If it's self generated, anybody could sign a certificate claiming to be anybody else. The current system is to use authority figures who validate certificates are owned by the site you're trying to visit. This means you have a secure connection AND know you're interacting with the correct site.
Okay fair enough, but can I be a trusted entity and offer that service?
Sure, just convince the creators and maintainers of important software certificate stores to add your trust root. For example: Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, Linux, Cisco, Oracle, Java, Visa.
Your browser and/or OS has a list of trusted certs called "certificate authorities". When it receives a cert from a web site, it checks that it was signed by a CA. So what you're asking is to become your own CA.
That basically means convincing Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. that you know how to safely manage certs. It tends to be a pretty high bar. For example, many CAs have a root cert that they keep locked away in a safe that only a few people have access to behind several other layers of security. They have a secondary key that's signed by the root, and the secondary key is used to sign actual customer certificates. That way, they can expire the secondary every year or so and only ever use the root when they need a new secondary. IIRC, Let's Encrypt has two secondaries with overlapping expiration times.
So to answer your question, no, not unless you're willing to go to great lengths and have a great deal of knowledge about TLS.
I don't know what the process is like to become a certificate authority. I imagine the answer is technically yes but realistically no, at least not as an individual. You'd be providing a critical piece of internet infrastructure, so you'd need the world to consider you capable of providing the service reliably while also capable of securing the keys used to sign certificates so they can't be forged. It's a big responsibility that involves putting a LOT of trust in the authority, so I don't think it's taken very lightly.
Correct, though to be pedantic anyone can be a CA- you just generate a cert with the right bits to say it's a ca certificate and then use it to sign any other certificate you want.
But the only devices that will consider your signature worth anything are ones you also install your ca certificate on. So it's useful and common in internal networks but isn't really what is being asked here.
The hard part is getting in the root CA store of operating systems and browsers. As far as I know they are all maintained independently with their own requirements.
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