I’m curious what the benefits are of paying for SSL certificates vs using a free provider such as letsencrypt.
What exactly are you trusting a cert provider with and what are the security implications? What attack vectors do you open yourself up to when trusting a certificate authority with your websites’ certificates?
In what way could it benefit security and/or privacy to utilize a paid service?
And finally, which paid SSL providers are considered trustworthy?
I know Digicert is a big player, but their prices are insane. Comodo seems like a good affordable option, but is it a trustworthy company?
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AFAIK, the only reason not to use Letsencrypt are when you are not able to automate the process to change the certificate.
As the paid certificates are valid for 12 month, you have to change them less often than a letsencrypt certificate.
At work, we pay something like 30-50€ for a certificate for a year. As changing certificates costs, it is more economical to buy a certificate.
But generally, it is best to use letsencrypt when you can automate the process (e.g. with nginx).
As for the question of trust: The process of issuing certificates is done in a way that the certificate authority never has access to your private key. You don’t trust the CA with anything (except your payment data maybe).
PSA: All public certificates (private internal certificates won’t be affected) will have a lifetime of only 90 days soon. Google is planning to reduce their lifetime in 2024 but considering that they haven’t given an update on this since early this year, I doubt it will happen this year.
But it will happen soon.
This will be a pain in the ass for my workplace because we primarily use Digicert and manually renewing certificates every 90 days is just impossible for use. We are currently looking into a way to switch to letsencrypt or similar.
You’re right, Google released their vision in 2023, here is what it says regarding lifespan:
a reduction of TLS server authentication subscriber certificate maximum validity from 398 days to 90 days. Reducing certificate lifetime encourages automation and the adoption of practices that will drive the ecosystem away from baroque, time-consuming, and error-prone issuance processes. These changes will allow for faster adoption of emerging security capabilities and best practices, and promote the agility required to transition the ecosystem to quantum-resistant algorithms quickly. Decreasing certificate lifetime will also reduce ecosystem reliance on “broken” revocation checking solutions that cannot fail-closed and, in turn, offer incomplete protection. Additionally, shorter-lived certificates will decrease the impact of unexpected Certificate Transparency Log disqualifications.
The background is that certificate revocation is a broken system and having short lived certificates makes the problem go away. You don’t need to worry about how to tell people that some certificate is bad if it’s only valid for a few days.
Ideally, certificates would only be valid for a few days, it should be automated anyway. This has other downsides as I can imagine, like creation of more traffic. My self signed CA for my home LAN has 4 days as standard, and it works perfectly fine.
There are more reasons, as LetsEncrypt might be more restrictive on what you can get (for example, you cant get a certificate for an IP address from them). But, as 99.99% of usecases do not require anything like that, go with letsencrypt until you know of a reason not to.
No proper CA should give out a certificate for an IP, that’s a no go by the common rules.
I see why automatically giving them out (like in ACME) would be a bad idea, but other than that, why not? Even https://1.1.1.1 has a DigiCert cert.
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Why?
Let’s encrypt is free and secure. There is no good reason not to use it.
I think their question is, what do you mean by “secure”? Because as the saying goes for internet services: usually, if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
Let’s Encrypt is a non profit largely started by the Electronic freedom foundation (eff) to bring https to the internet. Before it was very trivial to spy and modify web traffic but now that https is everywhere it is much harder to do if not impossible. They are also the ones who pushed for all major browsers to adopt https only. In all major browsers you should get a page warning you that a site uses http instead of https. It is a very bad idea to use http in 2024 as it allows anyone along the line to modify traffic and to see what pages you are viewing.
I still use http a lot for internal stuff running in my own network. There’s no spying there… I hope … And ssl for local network only services is a total pita.
So I really hope browsers won’t adapt https only
Worked as a sysadmin for years dealing with all kinds of certificates. Liek others have said if you can’t automate the process a paid certificate buys you 12 months at a time in validity. Also wildcard certificates are more difficult to do automated with let’s encrypt. If you want EV certificates (where the cert company actually calls you up and verifies you’re the company you claim to be) you also need to go the paid route
In my experience trustworthyness of certs is not an issue with LE. I sometimes check websites certs and of I see they’re LE I’m more like “Good for them”
Also wildcard certificates are more difficult to do automated with let’s encrypt.
They are trivial with a non-garbage domain provider.
If you want EV certificates (where the cert company actually calls you up and verifies you’re the company you claim to be) you also need to go the paid route
The process however isn’t as secure as one might think: https://cyberscoop.com/easy-fake-extended-validation-certificates-research-shows/
In my experience trustworthyness of certs is not an issue with LE. I sometimes check websites certs and of I see they’re LE I’m more like “Good for them”
Basically, am LE cert says “we were able to verify that the operator of this service you’re attempting to use controls (parts of) the domain it claims to be part of”. Nothing more or less. Which in most cases is enough so that you can secure the connection. It’s possibly even a stronger guarantee than some sketchy cert providers provided in the past which was like “we were able to verify that someone sent us money”.
Having a non-garbage domain provider can be a luxury. I used to work at a place where we were paying boatloads of money for certificates from Sectigo for internal services, and they were charging us extra per additional name and even more if we wanted a wildcard, even though it didn’t cost them anything to include those options. Getting IT to set up the DNS records for Let’s Encrypt DNS verification was never going to happen.
The main benefits to paying for certs are
- as many said, getting more than 90 days validity for certs that are harder to rotate, or the automation hasn’t been done.
- higher rate limits for issuing and renewing certs, you can ask letsencrypt to up limits, but you can still hit them.
- you can get certs for things other than web sites, ie code signing.
The only thing that matters to most people is that they don’t get cert errors going to/using a web site, or installing software. Any CA that is in the browsers, OS and various language trust stores is the same to that effect.
The rules for inclusion in the browsers trust stores are strict (many of the Linux distros and language trust stores just use the Mozilla cert set), which is where the trust comes from.
Which CA provider you choose doesn’t change your potential attack surface. The question on attack surface seems like it might come from lacking understanding of how certs and signing work.
A cert has 2 parts public cert and private key, CAs sign your sites public cert with their private key, they never have or need your private key. Public certs can be used to verify something was signed by the private key. Public certs can be used to encrypt data such that only the private key can decrypt it.
OP’s security concern is valid. Different CAs may differ in the challenges used to verify you to be the domain owner. Using something that you could crack may lead to an attacker’s public key being certified instead.
This could for example be the case with HTTPS verification (place a file with a specific content accessible through your URL) if the website has lacking input sanitization and/or creates files with the user’s input at an unfortunate location that collides with the challenge.
This attack vector might be far-fetched, but there can certainly be differences between different signing authorities.
But even if you use GoMommy extra super duper triple snake oil security checked ssl cert, if I trick LetsEncrypt to sign a key for that domain I still have a valid cert for your site.
With paid certificates you can target ancient and unsupported operating systems like windows XP and android 2, letsencrypt is relatively recent and it’s not present in the root certificates of those systems
It actually seems more like a windows 10 compatibility dilemma for developers. You can support older systems but it would require some effort. The problem is not the absence of some specific certificates, but the absence of newer ciphers altogether.
This does give security but also removes backwards compatibility with some clients that might be important for some websites.
At some point it’s good to let things die
What exactly are you trusting a cert provider with and what are the security implications?
End users trust the cert provider. The cert provider has a process that they use to determine if they can trust you.
What attack vectors do you open yourself up to when trusting a certificate authority with your websites’ certificates?
You’re not really trusting them with your certificates. You don’t give them your private key or anything like that, and the certs are visible to anyone navigating to your website.
Your new vulnerabilities are basically limited to what you do for them - any changes you make to your domain’s DNS config, or anything you host, etc. - and depend on that introducing a vulnerability of its own. You also open a new phishing attack vector, where someone might contact you, posing as the certificate authority, and ask you to make a change that would introduce a vulnerability.
In what way could it benefit security and/or privacy to utilize a paid service?
For most use cases, as far as I know, it doesn’t.
LetsEncrypt doesn’t offer EV or OV certificates, which you may need for your use case. However, these are mostly relevant at the enterprise level. Maybe you have a storefront and want an EV cert?
LetsEncrypt also only offers community support, and if you set something up wrong you could be less secure.
Other CAs may offer services that enhance privacy and security, as well, like scanning your site to confirm your config is sound… but the core offering isn’t really going to be different (aside from LE having intentionally short renewal periods), and theoretically you could get those same services from a different vendor.
Do EV and OV certs actually provide additional useful? When was the last time you reviewed the certificate of a site you access for non work purposes?
EV certs give you an extra green bar or something along those lines. If your customers care about it, then you have to. If they don’t - and they probably don’t - it’s a waste.
They got rid of that years ago though.
My employer had an EV cert for years on our primary domain. The C-suites, etc. thought it was important. Then one of our engineers who focuses on SEO demonstrated how the EV cert slowed down page loads enough that search engines like Google might take notice. Apparently EV certs trigger an additional lookup by the browser to confirm the extended validity.
Once the powers-that-be understood that the EV cert wasn’t offering any additional usefulness, and might be impacting our SEO performance (however small) they had us get rid of it and use a good old OV cert instead.
Not the only use cases, but you’d need a different service if you need/want wildcard certs, certs that are manually installed and managed, or certs with a longer expiration.
Letsencrypt issues wildcard certificates. This is however more complicated to setup.
I’d say they’re actually easier, at least in my experience. Since wildcard certs use DNS-01 verification with an API, you don’t need to deal with exposing port 80 directly to the internet.
People who have actually relevant use cases with the need for a reliable partner would never use LE. It’s a gimmick for hobbyists and people who suck at their job.
If you have never revoked a certificate, you don’t really know what you’re doing. If you have never run into rate-limiting issues with LE that block a rollout, you don’t know what you’re doing.
LE works until it doesn’t, and then it’s like every other free service on the internet: no guarantees If your setup relies on the goodwill of a single entity handing out shit for free, it’s not a robust setup. If you rely on that entity to keep an OCSP responder alive for free so all your consumers can verify the validity of your certificate, that’s not great. And people do this to save their company $1 a month for the real thing? Even running the shitty certbot in compute has a larger cost. People are so blindly in love with this “free” garbage. The fanboys will never die off
I don’t understand what digicert could possibly do that Let’s encrypt doesn’t. Let’s encrypt is free and transparent. Digicert is just a relic from the past. Don’t believe me? Look at the number of websites using Let’s encrypt
Unless you are in a specific industry Let’s encrypt is a good and sane choice
I actually agree. For the majority of sites and/or use cases, it probably is sufficient.
Explaining properly why LE is generally problematic, takes considerable depth of information, that I’m just not able to relay easily right now. But consider this:
LE is mostly a convenience. They save an operator $1 per month per certificate. For everyone with hosting costs beyond $1000, this is laughable savings. People who take TLS seriously often have more demands than “padlock in the browser UI”. If a free service decides they no longer want to use OCSP, that’s an annoying disruption that was entirely not worth the $1 https://www.abetterinternet.org/post/replacing-ocsp-with-crls/
LE has no SLA. You have no guarantee to be able to ever renew your certificate again. A risk not anyone should take.
Who is paying for LE? If you’re not paying, how can you rely on the service to exist tomorrow?
It’s not too long ago that people said “only some sites need HTTPS, HTTP is fine for most”. It never was, and people should not build anything relevant on “free” security today either.
The have a lot of sponsors. They are not going anywhere anytime soon.
If you don’t like free stuff you really shouldn’t be here. Stick with Reddit or whatever other service.
Let’s encrypt, and any other ACME based certificate of authorities will let anyone without identity verification create a SSL cert that will work in any browser. This creates trust issues with certain clients browsing web. For example my work (50k+ employees) uses Zscaler to evaluate if a website is safe and it 100% will down-votes any site that uses let’s encrypt due to the lack of transparency. Zscaler will eventually block that website from employees if the score falls too low. Having an SSL cert that you pay for gives cyber security, firms - rightly or wrongly - an additional level of confidence that your identity has been verified.
Full disclosure: I use let’s encrypt on all my self hosted docker instances via Coolify which suits my needs. If I were to set up an ecommerce or other site that needs to guarantee trust, I would absolutely use a paid ssl cert.
Neither does Google Trust Services or DigiCert. They’re all HTTP validation on Cloudflare and we have Fortune 100 companies served with LetsEncrypt certs.
I haven’t seen an EV cert in years, browsers stopped caring ages ago. It’s all been domain validated.
LetsEncrypt publicly logs which IP requested a certificate, that’s a lot more than what regular CAs do.
I guess one more to the pile of why everyone hates Zscaler.
hey I don’t make the trust rules. ZScaler is trash imo but hundreds of thousands of clients are ‘protected’ by their trust rules. People downvoting my post because it doesn’t wash with ‘the way things should be’ but in reality SSL certs are like email providers these days - if you aren’t paying with one of the big corps, a good portion of your web traffic (or email) might be blocked. Sad but true. There is a reason Let’s Encrypt and Cloudflare et al are heavily used by Crypto sites, and that is due to the anonymity they provide. If all you care about is encrypting traffic, use Let’s Encrypt. If you care at all about perception of trust, use paid SSL. simple.
we have Fortune 100 companies served with LetsEncrypt certs
these are subdomains of a verifiably certified root domain no doubt
Untrue. I work for a global enterprise company that transacts hundreds of millions of dollars via LE certs.
I believe you, but I also very much believe that there are security vendors out there demonizing LE and free stuff in general. The more expensive equals better more serious thinking is unfortunately still quite present, especially in big corps. Big corps also seem to like the concept of having to prove yourself with a high price of entry, they just can’t believe a tiny company could possibly have a better product.
That doesn’t make it any less ridiculous, but I believe it. I’ve definitely heard my share of “we must use $sketchyVendor because $dubiousReason”. I’ve had to install ClamAV on readonly diskless VMs at work because otherwise customers refuse to sign because “we have no security systems”. Everything has to be TLS encrypted, even if it goes to localhost. Box checkers vs common sense.
Certain unnamed companies coughgoogle doesn’t like to trust Let Encrypt its definitely not an abuse of an illegal monopoly they have good reasons I promise.
But the whole point behind using a signed certificate is that other people can look at you and immediately know you are who you say you are if a company doesn’t trust you it doesn’t really matter what the motivation is you might as well use a self signed certificate.
Paid certificates have the money to make sure everyone trusts them and has a reputation to maintain so are more likely to defend a legitimate complaint.
99.999% of individuals it simply doesn’t matter(although you might have to look into it if you’re using android apps) but to a company the little bit that certification costs is worth every penny.
Google is on of the biggest Lets Encrypt sponsors and where is LE not trusted?
Personally, I distrust any ecommerce site that uses any free cert. I see paid cert as a commitment to do honest business, as they need to have some records on the CA.
But for a blog or anythings other than ecommerce is totally fine by me.
Note: It is not about security, nor automation, but a show commitment (i.e. buying a cert), largely psycological.
IMO, sticking to manual processes that are error-prone is a waste of money and not a sign of a honest business.
Most paid certs aren’t worth much anyway. Payment and delivery info for DV certs isn’t validated by anyone, it’s literally the same concept as Let’s Encrypt. OV and EV are the only ones that theoretically have any value, but nobody is using those ever since they got rid of the URL bar labeling; even Amazon is on DV nowadays.
LetsEncrypt is legit. A downside is that the certs expire after 90 days. However, that also carries an upside in that it limits the damage in case a certificate is compromised. There are procedures by which you can automatically renew/request (I forget whether they allow renewing an existing cert or require a brand new one) LE certs and apply them to your application, but that can be fiddly to configure.
If you’re not comfortable with configuring automatic certificate cycling, a long-term paid cert would be more appropriate.
I didn’t say it isn’t legit nor I distrust automation, but I would like to see anyone operating an online shop paid for a cert to show they are honest and won’t diappear in thin air not delivering. Am I going to get back what I paid, properly not, but a basic DV cert isn’t expensive either for a business.
LetsEncrypt certs are DV certs. That a put a TXT record for LetsEncrypt vs a TXT record for a paid DigiCert makes no difference whatsoever.
I just checked and Shopify uses a LetsEncrypt cert, so that’s a big one that uses the plebian certs.
The difference between $0 and $50 isn’t really relevant.
Then I don’t see any problem for them just put down $50 more.
