Let's Encrypt now holds 35% of the market

https://nettrack.info/ssl_certificate_issuers.html

by tarellel • 9 years ago

659 247 9 years ago

013• 9 years ago

I think Let's Encrypt is great and their certbot tool makes it even better.

With Wildcard certificates coming to Let's Encrypt, I think they will only increase in users. (https://letsencrypt.org/2017/07/06/wildcard-certificates-com...)

osrec2• 9 years ago

Agree with this - it's one of the few missing features of lets encrypt. I think more SaaS websites will be inclined to use the service, especially ones that have user.saas.com subdomain structure.

frik2• 9 years ago

How about distributing Let's Encrypt?

Do cloud hoster offer a copy of the service from their datacenter? Otherwise it could be a single point of failure / single attack vector, right?

sova• 9 years ago

Mirroring Certificate Authorities seems to create more potential security holes...

stephenr2• 9 years ago

Their infrastructure is meant to all be HA from memory, and unless you're doing stupid things like caddy did[1] small windows of downtime shouldn't cause much issue for ongoing operations anyway - you will likely be starting to attempt renewing certs weeks before they expire.

1: https://github.com/mholt/caddy/issues/1680

pjc50• 9 years ago

Distributing a CA makes it less secure, not more; ultimately the thing that "is" a CA is the private key, which ought to be stored in a HSM and never let out.

frik2• 9 years ago

I meant a clone/copy of the (hopefully open) server software of LetsEncrypt stack running as a service on several well known cloud datacenters - of course under a different name.

Why? Not a single point of issue. Given now that it has now 25% market share, it's a high profile target, and given he short cert lifetime aggressive updating is necessary meaning you could receive a underhanded cert in case someone gets access to the high profile target. If Let's Encrypt is not a startup and doesn't plan to make money, then there should be no problem to release the whole service as DEB/package so that every big hosted can run a clone under a different name. Or is LetsEncrypt in the business of gathering analytics and selling the usage data? I think no.

dijit4• 9 years ago

I'm quite sad that they're doing the wildcard thing. There are RFCs stating the problems they cause[0]. It would have been nice to steer people away from this awful security practice.

I wrote a very opinionated and ranty blog post which goes into more detail ( but strongly implies people lazy :( )

https://blog.dijit.sh/please-stop-advocating-wildcard-certif...

[0] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6125#section-7.2

lclarkmichalek• 9 years ago

In my opinion if you’re lazy enough to warrant a wildcard cert then you’re too lazy to do security properly anyway, period.

You don't present yourself in a way conductive to convincing anyone of anything.

troyjfarrell• 9 years ago

Do you have an opinion on Sandstorm's use of wildcard certificates and randomized hostnames for each application sesssion? [0] They insist that this provides many desirable security features. (Note that the free HTTPS certificates provided by the Sandcats.io service are renewed every week. [1])

[0] https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/wildcard/#...

[1] https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/sandcats/#...

ceejayoz• 9 years ago

I question the accuracy of an article that claims insurance should make a difference in SSL certificate selection. To my knowledge, the policies on SSL certificate insurance are deliberately and carefully crafted to exclude basically every likely compromise scenario so that no SSL vendor has ever had to pay one out.

blacksmith_tb• 9 years ago

LE already supports SAN, which seems like it would cover quite a few of the reasons people want wildcards already, shouldn't it?

greggman• 9 years ago

good ! certs shouldn't be only something for people with $$$.

randomstring• 9 years ago

Agreed. Paying someone money for a bag of random bits is criminal.

icebraining• 9 years ago

The random bits are provided by the client. The CA signature is definitely not random.

hosh2• 9 years ago

I'd be interested to see whether the total numbers of SSL sites has expanded because of LetsEncrypt.

I remember, one of the arguments that the Comodo CEO had on the forum was a rant about LetsEncrypt attacking their business model. While there were a lot of weird things in that rant, it does seem reasonable that a free service will erode the paid, commercial offering. So I would be curious if Letsencrypt is enabling people who otherwise would not have gotten an SSL cert, as well as the extent Letsencrypt is taking away customers.

I would also be curious to see what happens when wildcard SSL certs are launched.

schoen5• 9 years ago

https://www.wired.com/2016/04/scheme-encrypt-entire-web-actu...

And because 85 percent of those sites never had HTTPS before, it's already significantly boosted the total fraction of sites that are encrypted on the web as a whole. Based on numbers Mozilla gathers from Firefox users, encrypted sites now account for more than 42 percent of page visits, compared with 38.5 percent just before Let's Encrypt launched. And Aas says that number is still growing at close to one percent a month.

(I work on Let's Encrypt.)

CydeWeys• 9 years ago

You're a vital part of something my team is working on. Thanks for all your work.

Context: https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/broadening-hsts-to-s...

chias2• 9 years ago

Let's Encrypt has been of enormous service to me. It's not just about saving money -- it's about changing my perspective and expectations to "encrypted by default".

Thank you so much.

berbec2• 9 years ago

This is something that is going to save a company I work for thousands annually. Extended Validation certificates for dozens of domains and subdomains. Now we just plug certbot into crontab and forget about it, forever!

Thank you for all the work you do. It is a great service you have given the world at large.

0xfeba• 9 years ago

Thanks for your work.

foxhop• 9 years ago

I hope it isn't profitable to sell signed certificates anymore. That is something that was bound to die. Long live the commons and public the domain.

hosh2• 9 years ago

At least with DV certs. Having worked at a legaltech company for a couple years with lawyers, I've gain some appreciation for the role of governance. I can still see EV certs having a place in this ecosystem.

DV certs though ... largely felt like a scam to me, back when I learned how they work in the early days of the web.

chias2• 9 years ago

So I would be curious if Letsencrypt is enabling people who otherwise would not have gotten an SSL cert

Since Lets Encrypt, every last thing I put on the Internet leverages SSL. Prior to Lets Encrypt, I had purchased a single SSL cert, ever, because I don't have the money to throw at every little thing I like to create and play with.

Admittedly the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but assuming I'm not special, my suspicion is "very much yes".

giobox2• 9 years ago

I'd be shocked if it hasn't. The announcement from Google a year or so ago that sites not using SSL would suffer a small but undefined down-ranking in search results I think also really helped drive adoption too, and doubtless drove some into the arms of LetsEncrypt and their free certificates.

systematical2• 9 years ago

For me, I would never have bothered securing my personal site and small project sites with SSL. With Lets Encrypt they are all SSL now. I assume many devs with side sites are doing the same, but that may be just a drop in the bucket.

aidenn0• 9 years ago

I switched from self-signed to LE for all of my personal sites. I had gotten some other free SSL cert provider up and running for one site, but it was a lot of steps; I would probably have paid $5 per year or so over free for something as convenient as LE, were LE not free.

twothamendment• 9 years ago

So I would be curious if Letsencrypt is enabling people who otherwise would not have gotten an SSL cert, as well as the extent Letsencrypt is taking away customers.

For my personal stuff, it is both. I paid for a single cert on my little server, but it hosted a handful of domains. It wasn't practical to secure the rest with only a single IP or to expensive to pile them all on a single cert. Let's Encrypt replaced one paid cert and secured 5 other domains that I otherwise wouldn't have.

This bled into work where we replaced all paid certs(except wildcards, coming soon) and secured hundreds of domains were not before.

ryanSrich• 9 years ago

We use Let's Encrypt for new environments at Datica [1]. It's one of better features we've implemented. LE is one of the better companies out there. Truly doing useful work.

1. https://resources.datica.com/compliant-cloud/articles/guides...

shpx• 9 years ago

I doubt the web will ever be fully encrypted. There will always be tons of people who don't care enough. I've come across dozens of high information static websites that were set up like 10+ years ago where the author will probably never be back to configure tls.

It's so strange that you have to ask someone's permission to use encryption[0]. Certificate authorities should've been (should be?) optional. SSH came out around the same time and its Trust-on-First-Use is a much better system.

[0] https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/moving-to-https

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_on_first_use

wahern• 9 years ago

The original impetus for SSL/TLS was to permit credit card transactions. For a long time only banking websites and retail checkout pages were encrypted. In that light it makes more sense why the industry focused so heavily on certificate authorities. People were told never to enter their credit card number unless the "secure" icon was displayed; if it did, then they could trust the site much like they would trust any brick & mortar store.

Back in the early days you couldn't get a certificate without faxing in a copy of your business registration. A certificate authority's digital imprimatur implied something substantial about the credibility of a site, however imperfect the process. But as the certificate authority market diversified there was a race to the bottom in terms of credible certificate authorities. We've been at that bottom for so long that it does seem ridiculous that we didn't have Let's Encrypt earlier.

kunimu• 9 years ago

For a long time only banking websites and retail checkout pages were encrypted.

For my experience, this still holds in Japan, and I've heard in Korea.

Fnoord4• 9 years ago

Back in the early days you couldn't get a certificate without faxing in a copy of your business registration.

Well well, guess who could easily spoof that one.

A certificate authority's digital imprimatur implied something substantial about the credibility of a site, however imperfect the process.

Not just the process. SSL downplay attacks and lack of certificate pinning already existed back in those days.

As long as those attacks are unknown you may still be reasonably secure against a MITM from a banana state government or a random ISP.

Also, lets not forget that running your entire website on HTTPS was expensive on resources before the 10s.

So the argument "because we can" makes sense. That doesn't mean all that information has to be encrypted. However, if you want to harm a surveillance state, then one act is causing significant noise. Uninteresting, encrypted data is noise and potentially yields plausible deniability.

The other argument is "because we have to". Different attacks have been demonstrated on that one: hostile networks such as ISPs injecting ads, hijacking DNS, open WiFi, impersonating fraudulent websites are just a few examples.

cortesoft• 9 years ago

I think SSH and HTTPS have very different use cases, which is why their cert structure is different. Most people ssh to servers they either own or have a working relationship with. Https, on the other hand, is very often used to connect to sites that you have no relationship with, but you still want to know that you are connecting to who you think you are.

SSH works on the premise that you should know, or have a way to check, the key for the server you are connecting to. That really doesn't happen with HTTPS.

greenhouse_gas2• 9 years ago

The thing is that:

1. TOFU won't scale - if I have a single SSH host, I can easily verify the server key out of band, and then never change it (though that's quite an insecure proposition if you ask me). How would you do this to _every single website you visit?_ And if you don't verify out-of-band (like calling up the host), how do you know that you're not being massively MITMed? And then when you leave your house and go to an airport and get a "your certificate changed", all it means is that _now_ you're connecting to the real page, and not MITM page. And even if you verified the original cert and now get a "site certificate has changed". It could mean that the owner rotated his private key. What do you do? 99% will just say "false alarm, ignore, move on".

2. WoT - It's a false sense of security. You're trusting that random people on the internet will 1. Bother doing _any_ verification before signing someone's key and 2. People will keep their private keys safe from botnets. And the network has perverse incentive - the less verification a group does, the more cross-signing they'll do, the more "trusted" it is.

pishpash2• 9 years ago

Exactly, a stolen key and no verification and you're back to traffic in the clear. Just because you do some encryption doesn't mean you're somehow protected.

dheera• 9 years ago

Of course, airports will DNS poison you to serve up the stupid Wi-Fi ToS. google.com never loads due to a HTTPS error, so at airports I usually use aoeu.com or some other non-encryted site to agree to the ToS-by-poisoning.

nvr2192• 9 years ago

I doubt the web will ever be fully encrypted. There will always be tons of people who don't care enough.

I'm one of those people. The grocery list app I use doesn't use SSL and I don't really care because it's just my grocery list lol.

hunter2_2• 9 years ago

Right now it's just your grocery list. In the future when it's sucked up into the algorithms used by the underwriters of your health insurance and life insurance, and you can't quite figure out why you aren't getting the healthy-eating-disguised-with-some-ambiguous-name discount, maybe your grocery selection is to blame.

cm21872• 9 years ago

If there is any password involved you should care. Perhaps you use nice rabdom unique passwords, but most users won’t.

jwatt• 9 years ago

How are you sure it's only your grocery list? You trust the networks and states that the content is transferred through to not inject anything potentially malicious or otherwise undesirable into the content? The only way you can be relatively confident that's not happening if the content is delivered via HTTPS, surely.

jaas3• 9 years ago

I doubt the web will ever be fully encrypted. There will always be tons of people who don't care enough.

I don't think the Web will become fully encrypted by virtue of everyone caring enough to move to HTTPS.

The knockout punch for unencrypted sites will come when browsers make the decision to not load plain HTTP sites by default in order to protect their users. At that point, for the vast majority of people, the Web will be 100% HTTPS because they'll never see a site that isn't HTTPS.

We just have to get the encryption percentage high enough to allow browsers to finish the job.

Gracana• 9 years ago

What about the other part, the vast quantities of information that will never be encrypted because the sites remain but the people have moved on or are gone? Why does that deserve a knockout punch?

spc476• 9 years ago

Oh I can't wait for that day. Then I can sell an Internet enabled appliance with a certificate that lasts just as long as the warranty! Recurring revenue here I come!

feelix• 9 years ago

The knockout punch for unencrypted sites will come when browsers make the decision to not load plain HTTP sites by default

Or encryption will just get backported to http eventually. I never understood why they didn't just do that in the first place.

emj2• 9 years ago

Sadly because of SNI browsers send the domain name in clear text, so I do not feel there is much to gain in going all encrypted. HTTPS/HTTP2 is broken by default in this regard and there is no way you can fix it other than using a VPN. At least with DNS you can do something about it your self.

username223• 9 years ago

The knockout punch for unencrypted sites will come when browsers make the decision to not load plain HTTP sites by default in order to protect their users.

That would be a terrible idea: it would break every "http:" link in existence, requiring people to edit billions of documents. And if "modern" browsers started pretending that "http:" meant "https:", it would break every other browser and lots of bots.

ehsankia• 9 years ago

Honestly question, is there any reason why a static website should have SSL? Unless you have encrypted DNS, whoever is stealing the data will know the server you're connecting to, and therefore will have all the exact data anyways. So HTTPS is quite literally a waste, no?

Sorry for the ignorance, it's a legitimate question.

greenhouse_gas2• 9 years ago

The server, but not the URL. And they can't _modify_ content.

mnordhoff• 9 years ago

A number of web pages from better writers than me will argue why you need HTTPS. E.g. it provides integrity (so the coffee shop WiFi can't insert ads in your site), and browsers only enable some features on HTTPS sites.

https://doesmysiteneedhttps.com/

boomlinde• 9 years ago

See it not only as encryption, but a sealed envelope that verifies the integrity of the website which could otherwise be compromised by a man in the middle, unfortunately often an ISP to insert billing reminders, ads and promotions. Perhaps more nefariously by a hacker to replace your bitcoin wallets and Paypal links with his own...

vertex-four4• 9 years ago

Among other things, they can tell you're reading wikipedia but not that you're reading about <controversial subject of the day>, and they can tell that you're browsing youtube but not able to sell data that you watch PewDiePie every day. They're also prevented from messing with the data - providing incorrect information, blocking individual pages, and inserting advertisements.

cesarb• 9 years ago

Even if the site is supposed to be static, an active attacker can still inject dynamic code into it.

In one somewhat recent example, a non-HTTPS page was modified in transit by an attacker to inject Javascript code which did a denial-of-service attack against github. Had the page used HTTPS, the attacker would not be able to inject that Javascript.

bo1024• 9 years ago

It's a great question. One is protection from ISPs. Over http, they can see everything you're browsing -- the exact page and data -- whereas with https I believe they only see the top-level domain (e.g. they know you're on hacker news, but not which thread). Worse, the ISP can potentially modify pages, inject code and advertisements, etc. In the US, we know that ISPs have done these things and now sell browsing info to advertisers.

This was enough to convince me to add https to my static blog.

rootlocus• 9 years ago

I doubt the web will ever be fully encrypted.

n-gate.com will make sure of that http://n-gate.com/software/

csomar• 9 years ago

If browers start blocking unecrypted traffic then it will.

ringaroundthetx• 9 years ago

Side note: I use Amazon certificates (ACM) and I had someone try to "verify me" using Extended Verification procedures, ACM doesn't have EV, it is listed as one of the limitations, but the real question I have is:

What is Extended Verification

Why would I want Extended Verification

Why would I look more legitimate to someone looking for Extended Verification? Because my business/personal information would be associated with the certificate or something?

detaro• 9 years ago

Because my business/personal information would be associated with the certificate or something?

Exactly. EV certs are tied to a business, and said business' identity is verified in the process. Where for a domain validated (DV) cert the CA only verifies that you control the domain/the server it is pointing to, an EV cert also has the business name (and browsers generally show that). If you own ringaround.com, I can register ringaround.io and get a cert for that and try to impersonate your website to users, but I'll have a harder time getting an EV cert for ringaround Ltd.

The limitation of course it that this requires users to actually check/notice the cert isn't an EV one, which is why the usefulness of EV is questioned.

jamiesonbecker6• 9 years ago

Actually, only a slightly harder time. If the company hasn't already locked down all the TLD's for their given name, then it's probably a piece of cake to register that company name in some locale and then get the EV for it. (I've done the EV verifications, and they're not really that challenging; and how could they be, since they have to validate companies all over the world, with varying amounts of paperwork, etc.) Keep in mind that companies in the United States are registered (generally with the Secretary of State) in their state, so now you've got fifty different ways of verifying just U.S. companies. Someone registered ringaround, Ltd in California already? Just register it in Nevada, or Florida, or Delaware, or.. you get the picture. Many of these can be registered in about fifteen minutes with a credit card.

But not to pick on the U.S.. if you're from outside the country, the U.S. is actually a pretty nice place to base your company. But, if you were the EV company, how would you verify a company in Nevis or Timbuktu? How will you REALLY know if that company is even legit or if the company just hands out "Corp" or "Ltd" or "IBC" to anyone who pays $50 on a credit card?

EV isn't quite a joke, but it's not really as useful as the companies pushing it make it out to be.

Ajedi32• 9 years ago

I assume they mean Extended Validation?

Basically the only difference is that it gets you a green badge in the URL bar with the name of your business: https://i.stack.imgur.com/xmMnB.png

In practice, very few sites actually need EV. Domain validation is usually enough. (Troy Hunt wrote a pretty good article on this a while back: https://www.troyhunt.com/on-the-perceived-value-ev-certs-cas...)

Kliment2• 9 years ago

Interestingly, apparently Twitter has switched to EV since that article was published. Not sure if any of the other big10 have also.

ToFab1234• 9 years ago

I wish they would make Microsoft IIS a first class citizens. If they are true to their mission they should set any political reasons aside, and provide official support for all platforms. AFAIK there are no technical reasons that prevents them to implement support for IIS and Azure Web Sites. There are a number of user created solution for both, that works well, but i would feel more comfortable with using that in production with official vendor support. So either Microsoft should fund this or lets encrypt should and i wonder why none of them has.

toomuchtodo• 9 years ago

Have you tried asking Microsoft for Azure support of it?

Devil’s advocate: AWS rolled their own CA and cert management system.

ToFab1234• 9 years ago

It requires an Enterprise Support Agreement to ask that kind of questions to the IIS / Azure Web App product team and I do not have that.

It super simple to buy and add a paid SSL certificate to your Azure Web Site, but a paid solutions is not the topic of this thread.

partiallypro• 9 years ago

I'm hoping Microsoft releases a tool/blade for managing certs in general, even with a marketplace with auto-renewals, etc. The third party extension for Azure web apps for Let's Encrypt isn't bad it's just a pain to set up the first go round.

https://www.siteextensions.net/packages/letsencrypt/

jaas3• 9 years ago

Let's Encrypt doesn't directly produce any client software. ACME clients are built by our community and the community builds what they feel like building. If something hasn't been done yet, or isn't where you want it to be, that reflects community priorities, not our politics.

We'd love to work more closely with Microsoft. We've been talking with Microsoft and various Microsoft community members about building great support for IIS since before Let's Encrypt launched.

ToFab1234• 9 years ago

Thank you for clearing that up and my apologies for implying political motivation on your side!

lwhalen2• 9 years ago

Not trying to start a Slashdot-class flame war or anything, but why are you on a platform that is so... belligerent to being on a network? Microsoft has been dead to me in the datacenter for at least ten years, for reasons far beyond the peanut-gallery "hur hur M$ $ucks!" There's oodles of options, many of which are far simpler to manage than a Microsoft stack, with commercial support available. I'm genuinely curious, what's keeping you there?

flomo• 9 years ago

Because I downvoted you, I'll say that critiques like this are totally ineffective without examples. I haven't worked with Windows/IIS in like ten years, but I recall they had APIs for certificate management and http, system scripting languages (including javascript), scheduling tools and so on. Not sure what else you would want or need. If you have a substantial argument, it would be interesting to hear it.

(And I'll say I'm only posting this because I've had some not-good experiences with certbot. It is essentially a big foreign environment nailed onto your host and another 'thing' to tend to. Or perhaps you would describe it as Ubuntu Linux being "network belligerent.")

askvictor• 9 years ago

I've used https://github.com/Lone-Coder/letsencrypt-win-simple to good effect; it's under active development, and has Azure DNS support. Doesn't help with Azure-hosted sites as such, but works great with IIS.

xenophonf• 9 years ago

You want ACMESharp:

https://pkisharp.github.io/ACMESharp-docs/

systematical2• 9 years ago

Honestly I've been holding back on going with lets encrypt at my 9-5, partly because certificates through namecheap/comodo are only $9.95 per year. I'm surprised by how much market share it has already, time to jump on board. I imagine paid for certificates will be dead in a few years.

blibble• 9 years ago

I was surprised how easy it was to setup, and the huge advantage is that you never have to worry about renewals and the various problems associated with forgetting to renew ever again

gregmac2• 9 years ago

I recently have been working on moving a chunk of our infrastructure to a fully automated deployment. It consists of several micro services on various subdomains within 3 top level domains.

For the dev and staging environments, I used a sub-domain prefix: app1.staging.example.com, downloads.staging.examplecdn.com, etc. There's a script that looks through the deployed systems in it's environment and configures the proxy server appropriately -- including running certbot if needed to get certificates.

I used let's encrypt initially so we could actually test real SSL without the hassle of new certificates, especially when we wanted to deploy a new environment. It worked so well we just left it in when we deployed to production.

The cost of certificates is nothing compared to the effort to get someone to put it on the company card, renew it (and answer questions about what it is a year from now, yes we still need it), manage the private key, etc. Let's Encrypt is better in every way.

joering22• 9 years ago

Lets Encrypt provides wonderful services, but don't forget in business when something is free, it might end up costing you money.

Not only these certs are for 3 months, but what if their renewal services have hiccups. Not wishing them anything bad, but I can imagine that for whatever reason (including root cert being invoked if they happen to encrypt sites that normally wouldn't do like c.p.) I imagine that 35% of net rushing to a local cert provider to get a paid solution or face no traffic to their site at all.

Besides, the times of Thawte's 1999 when single cert was $150 are long gone; you can get a decent Comodo for $4.99 per year these days.

medmunds• 9 years ago

I’d been in the exact same not-worth-the-hassle-to-change-for-only-$9.95 mindset on one of my side projects. That is, until last year when Comodo engaged in some really shady behavior directed at Let’s Encrypt [1]. At that point, decided there was no way I was going to keep rewarding Comodo with my business — not even a measly ten bucks’ worth.

And now I couldn’t be happier I switched to Let’s Encrypt. Automatic renewals mean no more working through the partially-manual, email-based process we had to use with Comodo. And free+automated means I don’t think twice about using https on every new subdomain. Really, I don’t think at all about https anymore; it just works.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11964583

fivesigma• 9 years ago

Let's Encrypt is great.

I would like to see native ECC support and a more stringent validation mode that allows more than 3 months of certificate lifetime.

jaas3• 9 years ago

More stringent validation methods won't help with the ever-present possibility of private key compromise. So long as that's a real possibility and revocation is broken (which it clearly is), longer certificate lifetimes are a liability. Renewal needs to be automated so you don't care how often you have to renew.

Let's Encrypt will sign your ECC keys now, but we'll sign with our RSA keys. We'll likely have our own ECC trust chain some time next year.

alwillis• 9 years ago

March 2018 for native ECC support: https://letsencrypt.org/upcoming-features/

raides• 9 years ago

Putting all our eggs in one basket? This has never gone bad for the security field, right?

jopsen• 9 years ago

With ongoing certificate transparency efforts I'm less worried about this..

jamiesonbecker6• 9 years ago

as opposed to... putting all of our eggs in any number of CA baskets, where the CA's are basically random companies of random ethics in random locations and where the loss of any one of our eggs means the loss of ALL of them?

It's already gone bad for the security field ;)

tscs372• 9 years ago

Nothing stops any of the big CA's to offer their own ACME endpoint. It's an open standpoint based on software that is on github.

Running a ACME authority is not hard. The CA's just don't want to cannibalize their business.

tialaramex11• 9 years ago

At least one major commercial CA does offer ACME to paying customers. If you want ACME and want to use their CA, and have whatever their entry level enterprise price is burning a hole in your pocket, they will take your money.

They basically position it as "As well as integrating with Windows we also make everything work automatically with your weird Unix stuff like Apache or nginx" but it's an ACME service under the hood.

ACMEv2 (the Internet Standard RFC when that finally gets published) is a bit nicer for a commercial CA because it spells out how you use ACME to say e.g. "Hey, I'm paying customer #383829, here is proof - give me certificates on my account". The only easy way this could have worked in ACMEv1 wasn't terribly compatible with the limited understanding of cryptography that say Steve in accounting has.

gumby• 9 years ago

Why on earth is it only a third? What value do the other providers offer? (other than EV I mean, but most uses don't require that).

coldacid3• 9 years ago

Because some people/businesses are afraid of free things, and others would prefer to not have their certs rotate every 90 days (even if it's done automatically).

ocdtrekkie• 9 years ago

It starts bearing the question though: Is one CA being over a third of the market a good thing?

pishpash2• 9 years ago

Well, a third of the market that is not that important, over all. I don't see banks switching to LE to save a buck or two.

morgante• 9 years ago

Even though automated renewals are absolutely superior, as encouraged by LE, they do require some work to adopt. For a lot of businesses, it's easier to have someone manually renew every year or two than to do the migration work of setting up automated LE certs.

davb• 9 years ago

Not only setting up, but monitoring.

jeffchien• 9 years ago

Wildcard subdomains aren't supported yet (but should come in January [1]).

[1] https://letsencrypt.org/2017/07/06/wildcard-certificates-com...

perlgeek• 9 years ago

I guess it's mostly inertia.

Many people who don't live in the tech news bubble like we do might not have even heard of let's encrypt, or haven't realized that they could use it. Or the bad old "never touch a running system" mantra at work.

coldacid3• 9 years ago

If all you need is basic domain validation, which is the case for pretty much any site that just wants encryption and doesn't need real identity validation, Let's Encrypt is good enough. Add their tools for quickly generating and updating certs (so long as you're not using IIS) and it's no surprise that they're leading now.

jamiesonbecker6• 9 years ago

Agreed, but with the exception of EV-SSL/TLS, certs are fungible and therefore no site needs 'real' identity validation, because you can't actually see the identity anyway (short of running cert patrol or opening up the details page). It's also a crying shame that chrom* hid those details in developer tools now -- when before, at least, you had a fighting chance of seeing crypto/expiration/etc details. (Of course, with DV certs being treated the same as OV certs, someone with a DV cert could just forge all of the metadata, as long as they control the domain; DV CA's don't verify the metadata, by definition.)

In other words, I remember faxing data into verisign or thawte back in the day (not even that long ago), but OV is just not worth paying for anymore: OV provides zero value, now that DV certs are accessible. Someone who had access to your domain could just get a DV (or LE) cert and no one would be the wiser.

I'm not sad to say that Comodo wrote their own death certificate (ha) by racing to the bottom. It's hard to beat free and open source.. the only thing they've got to hold onto now is EV, and that's of diminishing value now as well.

schoen5• 9 years ago

(Of course, with DV certs being treated the same as OV certs, someone with a DV cert could just forge all of the metadata, as long as they control the domain; DV CA's don't verify the metadata, by definition.)

The Baseline Requirements require certificate authorities to be able to verify the correctness of the information that they include in each certificate -- including for DV. See the first subsections of section 3.2.2 of

https://cabforum.org/wp-content/uploads/CA-Browser-Forum-BR-...

adambrenecki• 9 years ago

(Of course, with DV certs being treated the same as OV certs, someone with a DV cert could just forge all of the metadata, as long as they control the domain; DV CA's don't verify the metadata, by definition.)

I don't know if every DV CA does this, but I got a couple of StartSSL's free certs a while back (before LE was around, and before the WoSign acquisition and subsequent debacle), and I recall the documentation saying "because this is a DV cert, we're just going to ignore all the metadata in your CSR and generate a certificate with those fields blank", or something along those lines.

coldacid3• 9 years ago

the only thing they've got to hold onto now is EV, and that's of diminishing value now as well.

Value in terms of cost, or in terms of utility? And if the latter, care to explain why? I know almost nothing on the business/political side of certificates.

sigjuice• 9 years ago

I hope Let's Encrypt does S/MIME certificates someday. Almost all major email clients support it.

tialaramex11• 9 years ago

Let's Encrypt isn't interested in S/MIME. You are, of course, welcome to try to repurpose their software and/or the ACME protocol to provision S/MIME certificates.

Although S/MIME isn't a real Wild West like some types of X.509 certificates, it has seen much less oversight than SSL/TLS ("Web PKI") certificates. There's also not really a great appetite for cleaning it up. If you want to be the hero in this story there's definitely an opening for that.

nurettin2• 9 years ago

Could https be used to track persons on the internet using some phase of the protocol? Perhaps the "random" number generated after a handshake is not so random and actually identifies you as a user?

Sure, your communications are encrypted by what people perceive as an infallible algorithm, and all serious websites with forms force you to use it, but at what cost?

zaarn2• 9 years ago

Perhaps the "random" number generated after a handshake is not so random and actually identifies you as a user?

If the RNG isn't random then the protocol just broke and HTTPS turns into paperweight.

You usually get tracked by your browser and remote IP much easier than tracking details in the TLS connection.

quickthrower26• 9 years ago

What about a session cookie?

nurettin2• 9 years ago

It is obviously very easy to evade cookies and IP tracking, so I'm not even sure why these are suggested.

However, if the https protocol itself is bugged at the TLS level, what can you do? What if the last few bytes of the ssl session number are always generated according to your unique hardware specs? What then?

I'm aware that this looks a lot like FUD, but it is rather a question, because I'm not peddling an alternative. Why implicitly trust any protocol?

tialaramex11• 9 years ago

I _think_ the number you're talking about is the session key. The session key is agreed by both parties. Key Agreement is actually some pretty clever mathematics, but it goes like this (except the real numbers are enormous and I've used small ones):

You: "Let's pick a session key, let's use method A, with the magic numbers 15 and 29. I chose my random number, and with A, 15 and 29 the answer was 4."

www.google.com: "Cool yes, method A with numbers 15 and 29 is fine by me. I picked a random number and my answer was 3."

Now both you and Google can determine that the secret session key is 9, because each of you knows _your_ secret random number and the number the other person got by using _their_ secret random number with the special method. But even if the other person lied and always picks the same number, the _result_ is random, because you did you part of the trick properly.

Nobody else knows it's 9, even if they eavesdropped on this conversation taking place, because they need one of the secret random numbers to work it out OR they need to solve a mind-bogglingly hard mathematical problem to get the answer without knowing the secret.

sandGorgon5• 9 years ago

Is anyone using letsencrypt using nginx+docker ? How do you take care of the chicken and egg situation when you spawn a nginx docker container - nginx cannot start without a valid certificate and you cannot generate a valid certificate without nginx.

I haven't looked into this for about six months - I just bought a wildcard SSL certificate for 70$ and called it a day.

osrec2• 9 years ago

Just wondering, why do you need nginx started to generate a valid certificate?

notamy• 9 years ago

LetsEncrypt uses having some files able to be served from your webserver to verify domain ownership afaik.

klodolph• 9 years ago

The Let’s Encrypt client validates your server by placing a file on your website at a specific location.

There are other ways too, but this is the easiest.

ben-schaaf2• 9 years ago

Using letsencrypt + nginx. You start with just a http server, letsencrypt does its thing and gives you a certificate, then you set up https.

sandGorgon5• 9 years ago

Manual setup with a running nginx server is easy. It's when you have docker on the mix that it all goes for a toss.

Are you using docker to spawn nginx ?

gnur• 9 years ago

I used it, and I used a combination of manual and automated steps.

It wasn't worth it in the end, perhaps you could look into traefik or caddy. Both can automatically request and refresh certificates for you, caddy is good for hobby projects and is very easy to configure, traefik offers a lot of features and can be a bit harder to setup, but is truly awesome if you connect it to an orchestrator for automatic request routing.

PuffinBlue3• 9 years ago

Is the reason that nginx wouldn't start because you're specifying the certificate location in the config?

So when it goes to start up it will fail because ther is no certificate in place? (If not then tell me why Nginx won't start).

If that's the case, don't link to where the certificate should be. That'll let nginx start, then the certbot-nginx tool can run and it'll add links to the generated certificates directly to your config files as part of the initilisation.

All it does is insert the paths to the certificate files before the final closing bracket of any server block that listens on port 443.

I use Ansible and automate the install of new server/sites, unless there's something extra different with Docker, the automation process should still work fine. It also still works if your config is setup to redirect all incoming from port 80 to 443.

sandGorgon5• 9 years ago

One time run commands and dependent commands are difficult in docker init. So I have to fall back upon a startup manager like supervisord. I tried that last time , but it was very funky.

Docker VM are like short lived machines with no dependency management in init. But 70$ for 3 years is a cheap price to pay versus giving up docker , nginx (vs traefik), etc

eastern• 9 years ago

Dropping marketshare for others may not mean falling business. It's possible that the market size is growing fast enough for the commercial ones to actually be seeing a growth in business.

karlshea• 9 years ago

This could definitely be true. I've set up SSL on a bunch of sites that otherwise wouldn't need it at all just because the Let's Encrypt client is so easy to get working.

ridgewell• 9 years ago

I also really wouldn't be surprised if Comodo's market share is inflated from the free SSL certificates that Cloudflare offers for all its users.

maddentim• 9 years ago

Well, does that make lets encrypt's market share inflated because they give away certs?

tialaramex11• 9 years ago

Is your hypothesis that Cloudflare doesn't _pay_ them for those certificates?

How about cPanel and others who bundle Comodo certificates?

No, I think Comodo are doing very nicely off this. They've correctly judged that they're never going to be the Maserati in this industry they need to be Ford or Toyota and too bad if some people sneer.

acdha• 9 years ago

This is especially likely given that many sites considered HTTPS in earnest only when Google started aggressively factoring it into search rankings or when they needed HTTP/2 for performance. Search & site speed are a lot easier to make a business case for than privacy, unfortunate as that may be.

tialaramex11• 9 years ago

This is in fact the case.

https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/ssl_certif...

Every CA is growing except StartCom who were distrusted by most players last year (and Microsoft, belatedly, remembered this year) and have recently declared they're throwing in the towel, won't try to get back their trust.

The big categories which shrank are "None" and "Invalid Domain", ie people who didn't have SSL, or were on shared hosting and never switched it on for their site or whatever.

gh0stbrain• 9 years ago

I think this is fantastic, it's amazing to see how Let's Encrypt just blasted off. It kind of scares me, one company having such a large presence, but I think it's one of the best companies it could have happened to. :)

IgorPartola• 9 years ago

It is hard to compete with free. I think if some CA made things as easy as the ACME protocol and the associated tools did, yet still charged $9/year, it would have delayed things a bit. But the end result would have been the same: $0 is the winning price.

gioele• 9 years ago

$0 is the winning price.

The weird (and pleasant) thing here is that the $0 price is backed not by a shady business, but by a non-profit [1] that hires a stellar team of TLS/DNS/Internet experts that does most of its job openly and in a replicable way.

[1] Internet Security Research Group (ISRG)

ersii2• 9 years ago

That doesn't mean that things will be pleasant forever. There are plenty of shady non-profit organizations.

timrichard• 9 years ago

Personally, I backed right away from it and went for paid certs with a client. Not great when it "kinda, sorta" works on Amazon Linux. The cost of the certs from namecheap seemed trivial compared to digging through GitHub issues to find out why the particular version of certbot running on a cron task hadn't renewed properly on a (customer production) EC2 instance. Screw that.

nkkollaw2• 9 years ago

Well, it's free and easy-to-use...

They need wildcard certs and they'll go to 90% (some companies will still need to use more "reputable" companies).

wnoise• 9 years ago

Wildcard certs are coming in January.

nkkollaw2• 9 years ago

It's truly amazing what a blow to the industry this will be, and apparently out of nowhere.

99/yr for a cert was too much, though, and everything very cumberstome compared to Let's Enctrypt

sAbakumoff2• 9 years ago

Apparently those 35% do not include samsung.com which does not use https:// at all, really!

coldtea• 9 years ago

To hide the fact that you're shopping from Samsung?

zaarn2• 9 years ago

Crimes like these should not be hidden from the public but should be exposed!

Sir_Cmpwn• 9 years ago

To prevent bad actors from intercepting your connection and injecting malicious scripts.

quickthrower26• 9 years ago

DNS ain't encrypted afaik. Snooper can see that you visited the site but not which url.

quickthrower26• 9 years ago

I wonder why? Great wall?

computerfriend• 9 years ago

In Korea?

sleepychu• 9 years ago

What? https://www.samsung.com works just fine. I don't know why they don't have re-direct set up.

chimeracoder2• 9 years ago

Browser usage patterns are very different in South Korea due to the Korean laws requiring obsolete (and no-longer-supported by modern systems) encryption for all retail transactions. That may have something to do with it.

sAbakumoff2• 9 years ago

Ok, here is how I found it:

* google "samsung multiroom app for mac"

* the second link leads to http://www.samsung.com/uk/support/tv-audio-video/where-can-i...

* click the link that leads to the main page

* no https!

which was quite confusing..I mean if google does not redirect to https, I was full within the range of sane assumptions about Samsung not supporting https but I see that they actually do, thanks!

avodonosov• 9 years ago

I hope this will let them to be profitable.

krisives2• 9 years ago

Does this count parts of the market that will be gone soon? Legitimate question didn't Starcom recently say they won't issue new certs and will shut everything off in 2020?

kijin• 9 years ago

StartCom hasn't had its own market share since late last year when most browsers distrusted it. It's been reselling certs from Comodo and Thawte, probably contributing to the market share of these other vendors.

krisives2• 9 years ago

Thanks for reminding me I had forgotten about that

megaman22• 9 years ago

I get that HTTPS is good for anything that's got sensitive data, but what really is the point of enabling it if you've got a static, old-school informational page? Aside from avoiding getting dinged by search engines?

pluma• 9 years ago

Herd immunity. If only sensitive data uses HTTPS, all HTTPS use is suspicious. If everything is HTTPS, the fact something uses HTTPS no longer makes it suspicious/interesting. It also makes policies banning access to HTTPS websites (i.e. clumsy traffic control) unfeasible.

lima• 9 years ago

ISPs are known to profile their customers by looking at unencrypted traffic or even inject ads.

Delivering browser exploits by injecting into unencrypted traffic is common practice.

C4K3• 9 years ago

Authenticity. To prevent somebody from modifying the page against your will, e.g. ISPs/Wifi hotspots inserting ads into all http pages.

Example (out of many): https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140908/07191228453/comca...

Matt3o12_• 9 years ago

There are a couple of reason. Encryption also preserves the data integrity. That means your ISP cannot inject ads or tracking scripts. I’ve heard that this is already quite common in some countries (including mobile services in the US). This also means that nobody who sits between the server and your internet connection can inject falsified information into that static page.

You also have more privacy. An attack can see that you are accessing Hacker News but not necessary what comment section you are on (though it can sometimes be inferred by the page size).

You might not care about that about your oldschool static side but someone who lives in suppressive countries might because it might make a big difference if they only access Hacker News for the latest and trendiest node framework or if you actively research the comments about articles how your country does something bad.

marcosdumay• 9 years ago

Have you seen those Intel-ME vulnerabilities that were on the front page yesterday and people kept saying they were not as bad as they look, because an attack would need to come from your LAN?

Injecting some Javascript into your static, non-sensitive pages is a great way to start an attack from inside your LAN.

rufi• 9 years ago

i have used its very simple to configure with cerbot and best of all its free

Fej• 9 years ago

Which (shared) web hosts remain opposed to Let's Encrypt?

Namecheap (my host, until I get around to switching) still is, for business purposes. (their customer service rep gave me some BS about "security" as to why, but it's really because they make a ton of money selling certs)

CamTin• 9 years ago

Most of the big hosts have exclusive agreements with certain CAs that prevent them from offering free SSLs through Letsencrypt. They will usually install a cert for you, sometimes for a fee, but never in an automated way, so even if you are using Letsencrypt, you'll need to open a ticket / pick up a phone every 90 days. You can't just write a cron and quit worrying about it, which is the central value proposition for LetsEncrypt/ACME as far as I'm concerned.

degenerate• 9 years ago

Get off namecheap. They got big by standing up to GoDaddy, but their prices are just as bad now. As you said, they make money through their SSLs.com so they will never support LE. They became the villain.

schmappel• 9 years ago

I use Namecheap too. Which host would you consider switching too?

AnsemWise• 9 years ago

Also wondering this

collinmanderson• 9 years ago

Would be nice to see the graph in absolute terms. - How much of this is people switching from other companies to Let's Encrypt, and how much of this is more websites getting SSL?

JeanMarcS• 9 years ago

I'm not sure it's the good way to present this (or phrase it). It's more that their presence enlarge the number of HTTPS sites (or service) by 50% (totally thumb in the wind estimation :-D ) than "stealing" customers to other companies.

Of course there's a part of migrating certificates to Let's encrypt, but I find it more important that the HTTPS surface had grown that much.

tialaramex11• 9 years ago

For the top 10 million sites examined by w3techs (which looks at sites to see if they use technologies like PNG, WebM, embedded fonts, whatever) HTTPS went from under 15% to almost 50% since they started measuring. Less than half that growth is Let's Encrypt, their growth is still spectacular, but to put things into perspective, if they had the _same_ growth and the whole HTTPS market didn't grow they would now control 110% of the market, yet in fact every other major CA grew at the same time.

m-p-3• 9 years ago

I'm waiting for wildcard support and then I'll switch.

likelynew• 9 years ago

Where is cloudflare?

stephenr2• 9 years ago

Cloudflare aren't a Certificate Authority, they use Comodo certificates.

BuleBule• 9 years ago

After spending a ton of money on SSL certs over the years, I not only salute Let's Encrypt but also fart in the general direction of those orgs who fail to support it.

covenator• 9 years ago

Yet Hostgator does not have LetsEncrypt for shared hosting users. Guess their paid SSL is too profitable.

Let's Encrypt now holds 35% of the market

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