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- Hacker News
- :(by hermeticlock
- thats too badby drsalt
- Let's encrypt is a single point of failure for a large percentage of the internet.by po1nt
- Hot take, but in general single points of failure are less of an issue than it seems because usually outages simply aren't that common. Meanwhile maintaining whole infrastructure to avoid single point of failure is often very expensive.by anal_reactor
- No, it's not. You can always switch to a different SSL provider. There are other free ones (as mentioned in other comments).
However, thinking about how to make your own setup more robust without having to manually change configuration when one SSL provider stops working is a good exercise. I wonder if you can just get your server's private key signed by multiple SSL providers, and serve multiple certificates to clients, and whether all browsers handle that correctly.
by gsliepen - It's a good thing that acme clients try to renew early, rather than leaving it to the last minute...by nubinetwork
- I realize this is very much not the point, but the fact that the "Active Incident" banner is green is upsetting.by ardeaver
- We're operating normally, but with reduced redundancy. We continue to work with our upstream ISP to identify and resolve the issue.by NewJazz
- Their monitors don't seem to be detecting the outage. Sometimes they run directly on the server, and aren't able to detect routing or DNS problems.by dlcarrier
- The banner's colour is based on the "Incident Status;" it's green because services are currently operational. It would be yellow or red if the impact were more severe.by Kesseki
- What are the viable alternatives to LE? And in case none exists, what does it take to build one?
Requirements: free, available to everyone, automation friendly, issues certificates that are actually considered trustworthy by other parties.
by pibaker - > What are the viable alternatives to LE?
None. Big tech intentionally made Let's Encrypt a single point of giant failure.
> And in case none exists, what does it take to build one?
A new Internet and Web standards stack. The whole problem is self-imposed -- we could have published self-signed Ed25519 keys on the DNS instead, and the result would be more secure than whatever it is we have now.
- Like peers could sign sites?by evbogue
- This video explores a little on how certificate authorities were given their authority and a lot on how it can fail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1si1y5lvkk
It's a bit mathy, but if you can make it through that, I highly recommend watching the whole video, especially if you like dad jokes.
by dlcarrier - Have the EU or Canada pushed to launch an analog of their own?
It seems a bit silly that a service that could be forced by EO to revoke foreign certificates is the backbone of so much of the internet.
- ZeroSSL – free 90-day certs via ACME, also has a web UI for cert management
Google Trust Services – free ACME certs, requires a Google account for registration
SSL.com Free DV SSL – offers free 90-day certs through ACME
by treesknees - To be clear, “Degraded Performance” means just that, not “down.” Let’s Encrypt’s issuance is mostly working fine.by Kesseki
- What % of requests succeeded vs failed? How many certificates were issued during the outage vs the average? That might actually clear things upby gib444
- They claim "Degraded Performance", but 400 and 500 error responses is a non fully working service and not a performance that is just "less good".
> Some clients may encounter 400 and 500 error responses.
by greatgib - I have tried many times to renew my certs and have had 0 successes throughout today. It seems to be 100% degraded to me.by widdakay
- I see you are unfamiliar with status page-ese. “Degraded performance” is a term which means some form of “the entire datacenter is probably on fire”.by saagarjha
- Seems not ideal for an entity who seems to be pushing for shorter expiration periods all the timeby saagarjha
- isn't this the other way around ??? because shorter expiration time resulting on more issuing cert and therefore make it more prone to downtimeby tonyhart7
- I think it’s mostly Apple and maybe Google who have the hard-ons for the shortest expiries possible.by xp84
- If it goes past 24 hours, that becomes a real worry.
If anyone is renewing certificates with less than a day remaining, that's an issue on their end far more than anything else.
by Dylan16807 - That explains why one of my IoT vendors is using an expired certificate.
I wish Firefox would just give a mild warning for a recently expired certificate, instead of treating it the same as a true man-in-the-middle attach. It's not like someone who couldn't factor the private key in 200 days could in 201 days or even 300 days.
I'm convinced that we'd have better security, if we didn't have so much security theater. You'd think TLS is useless, from the warning my phone gives if I connected to a public Wi-Fi AP, but then again there's nothing in TLS (or WPA) that prevents it from being used in a way that is completely useless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1si1y5lvkk
by dlcarrier - omg new tom7!by fragmede
- What you want is warning when certificate expiry in next 7 days, then everyone would update before the warning.by bluesign
- But it's only the extreme warning that alerts the website (usually via a customer complaining) that the cert hasn't been renewed. Having the lesser warning just kicks the can down the road.
The IoT should have updated the certs weeks in advance. If they haven't done it by day 0 then their process is broken and delaying the scary warning to say day +5 won't solve anything.
by bruce511 - There are reasons browsers do things the way they do.
Experience and user studies have shown that users have a hard time decoding what error messages mean. "This certificate is expired, but only for a little while" isn't meaningful for people who don't have a mental model of what a certificate is.
Furthermore, "downgrading" warnings increases the incentive to ignore issues, potentially causing more problems down the line.
by hannob