Happy birthday to Let’s Encrypt !
Huge thanks to everyone involved in making HTTPS available to everyone for free !
And it changed the Internet, for good and a lot.
Damn! That’s definitely a “I’m old” moment for me. I still remember when I first heard about the concept and I remember setting it up the first time on a self hosted project (which seemed harder back then).
Awesome project!
Man I love let’s encrypt, remember how terrible ssl was before the project landed?
I always had to fill out multiple pages of forms to get those free 1 year “trial” certs from startssl.
Remember they wanted like $75 for certs? The gall.
Crazy times. Nowadays it’s weird when a website doesn’t have https. Back then it was pretty much big companies only. And the price of a wildcard certificate…
Except for neverssl.com
Triggering the launch of captive portals for public Wi-Fi users everywhere yayy
And if you remember, that this whole shebang was only started, because Snowden revealed that the NSA spied on all of us, it’s getting much much darker.
I did not have the money to pay the insane amounts these greedy for-profit certificate authorities asked, so I only remember the pain of trying to setup my self-signed root certificate on my several devices/browsers, and then being unable to recover my private key because I went over the top with securing it.
Let’s Encrypt is amazing, but are there any equally trustworthy alternatives people could switch to if something bad happens to it?
They came up with the ACME protocol, so presumably somebody could. The real barrier to entry is the cost of getting into that certificate chain of trust. I have no idea why it’s so difficult and expensive.
If it begins to enshitify, someone will quickly take up the helm. It’s become so core now that someone like Cloudflare would just be like “We do this now.”
Cloudflare sort of provides this now by being a MITM to secure your site between your server and the end user. But this requires you and your end user to trust Cloudflare.
And fwiw the ACME protocol is open so anyone can implement it. I believe even the ACME software that EFF sends out allows you to choose your server with some configuration.
Maybe ZeroSSL
Yay for their glorious, free trusted ssl certs. Love this project!
