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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CA | (SSL) Certificate Authority |
| CF | CloudFlare |
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web |
| HTTPS | HTTP over SSL |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| SSL | Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption |
| TLS | Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
9 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
[Thread #969 for this sub, first seen 12th Sep 2024, 15:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
So, the web uses a system called chain of trust. There are public keys stored in your system or browser that are used to validate the public keys given to you by various web sites.
Both letsencrypt and traditional SSL providers work because they have keys on your system in the appropriate place so as to deem them trustworthy.
All that to say, you're always trusting a certificate authority on some level unless you're doing self signed certificates... And then nobody trusts you.
The main advantage to a paid cert authority is a bit more flexibility and a fancier certificate for your website that also perhaps includes the business name.
Realistically... There's not much of a benefit for the average website or even small business.
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).
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.
You can get wildcard certs with LetsEncrypt (since 2018): https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/acme-v2-production-environment-wildcards/55578
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.
Yes, it can be easier. But not every DNS provider allows API access, so you might need to change the provider.
(good luck with that in many enterprise scenarios).
Whoa, really??? I guess I just assumed nothing changed in the last 5 years. I need to look into that.