this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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Who benefits from this? Even though Let’s Encrypt stresses that most site operators will do fine sticking with ordinary domain certificates, there are still scenarios where a numeric identifier is the only practical choice:

Infrastructure services such as DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) – where clients may pin a literal IP address for performance or censorship-evasion reasons.
IoT and home-lab devices – think network-attached storage boxes, for example, living behind static WAN addresses.
Ephemeral cloud workloads – short-lived back-end servers that spin up with public IPs faster than DNS records can propagate.
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 23 minutes ago

I would read layman discussions about why this (by context?) is good.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

This could go a long way towards fighting online censorship. One less issue when an authoritarian overreach gets your domain seized. Pretty awesome.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I never understood why we don't use IP certificates to encrypt the domain with SNI.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

In much simpler terms:

Think of an IP address like a street address. 192 My Street.

There might be multiple businesses at one street address. In real life we address them with things like 1/192 My Street and 2/192 My Street, but there's no direct parallel to that in computer networks. Instead, what we do is more like directing your letter to say "Business A c/o 192 My Street". That's what SNI does.

Because we have to write all of that on the outside of the envelope, everyone gets to see that we're communicating with Business A. But what if one of the businesses at 192 My Street is highly sensitive and we'd rather people didn't know we were communicating with them? @bjoern_[email protected]'s proposal is basically like if you put the "Business A" part inside the envelope, so the mailman (and anyone who sees the letter on the way) only see that it's going to 192 My Street. Then the front room at that address could open the envelope and see that the ultimate destination is Business A, and pass it along to them.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 21 hours ago

There's Encrypted Client Hello, supported by major browsers that does the SNI encryption. It's starting to be fairly widely supported.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago

192 My Street

Except that with street addresses there is such a lack of inconsistency on how they work and are written that it is funny

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Currently before establishing an encrypted connection to a webserver the domain is sent to the webserver unencrypted so that the server can choose the appropriate certificate to use for encryption. That is called SNI, Server Name Indication.

Of course that's a privacy risk. There are finally protocols to fix this but they aren't very widespread and depend on DNS over HTTPS.

I think issuing certificates based on the IP and sending the domain name encrypted based on that certificate could have fixed this issue ages ago.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

F I N A L L Y

Now tell me it supports IPv6 and I'll be the happiest man alive

[–] [email protected] 0 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (2 children)

Maybe I'm not understanding it but I can't see what I would use this for due to the 6 day issue period. Bringing a NAS up to copy data for a couple days is the only real use case I find for home users.

Because even if you pay for a static external IP from your ISP, this doesn't support using such for longer than that period right?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Let's Encrypt is meant yo be used with automated certificate renewal using the ACME protocol. There are many clients for this. Both standalone and built into e.g. Caddy, Traefik and other software that does SSL termination.

So this specific concern doesn't really make sense. But that doesn't mean I really see a use case for it either, since it usually makes more sense to access resources via a host name.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago

Thanks! I'll look into that, this could be useful for me then after all. This is why it's always good to ask questions

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Can't it automatically be renewed?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 children)

Not sure, I just saw the 6 day thing in the article, that would be nice though

Edit: vorpal says you should be able to using ACME https://programming.dev/comment/17987211

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Would this work with a public dynamic DNS?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago

With dynamic DNS? Yeah it always has, as long as you can host a http server.

With a dynamic IP? It should do, the certs are only valid for 6 days for that reason.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Couldn't this prove very troublesome in combination with carrier grade nat?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago

They will require the requester to prove they control the standard http(s) ports, which isn't possible with any nat.

It won't work for such users, but also wouldn't enable any sort of false claims over a shared IP.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I don't see how? Normal HTTP/TLS validation would still apply so you'd need port forwarding. You can't host anything on the CGNAT IP so you can't pass validation and they won't issue you a cert.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You can totally host something on carrier-grade NAT using techniques like NAT hole punching.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

You don't get control of the incoming port that way. For LetsEncrypt to issue a certificate primarily intended for HTTPS, they will check that the HTTP server on that IP is owned by the requesting party. That has to live on port 80, which you can't forward on CGNAT.

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