This letter was originally published in our 2024 Annual Report.
The past year at ISRG has been a great one and I couldn’t be more proud of our staff, community, funders, and other partners that made it happen. Let’s Encrypt continues to thrive, serving more websites around the world than ever before with excellent security and stability. Our understanding of what it will take to make more privacy-preserving metrics more mainstream via our Divvi Up project is evolving in important ways.
When I look at the default list of trusted CAs in my browser, I get the feeling that certificate lifetimes isn’t the biggest issue with server certificates.
People who’d abuse trust into centralized PKI system are not real, they can’t hurt you, because if they abuse it, said system’s reputation will fall to zero, right?
Except it’s being regularly abused. LOL. And everybody is using it.
The sites I have most frequently have had to add expired certificates to use are US government websites. Particularly those affiliated with the military branches. It’s sad.
Yeah, now imagine pinning certs that change weekly.
My first thought is that old school secure software (like claws-mail) treats a cert change as a minor security incident, asking you to confirm every time. Completely different school of thought.
When I look at the default list of trusted CAs in my browser, I get the feeling that certificate lifetimes isn’t the biggest issue with server certificates.
People who’d abuse trust into centralized PKI system are not real, they can’t hurt you, because if they abuse it, said system’s reputation will fall to zero, right?
Except it’s being regularly abused. LOL. And everybody is using it.
The sites I have most frequently have had to add expired certificates to use are US government websites. Particularly those affiliated with the military branches. It’s sad.
Yes X.509 is broken. If you’re a developer and not pinning certs, you’re doing it wrong.
What
What part are you confused about, and are you a developer?
Edit: why was I downvoted for asking this?
Yeah, now imagine pinning certs that change weekly.
My first thought is that old school secure software (like claws-mail) treats a cert change as a minor security incident, asking you to confirm every time. Completely different school of thought.
You can pin to your own CA. Then it doesn’t matter if you want to update your certs frequently.
Right