I know that I can simply make my own private certificate authority that only I and my family trust. But is there some public provider like letsencrypt that is in a free-er part of the world than the US?
Is anyone wonders why it’s a problem it’s under US juristriction:
Look up the US Cloud Act. It’s everything the media told you China was, but in the hands of an orange dictator.
They have strong canaries in place, namely certificate transparency. They wisely designed themselves in a way to prevent themselves from tampering.
Well, honestly?
Since these certificates are not banned nor up for debate, the NSA probably already have a way to get all the data through another loop hole.
Yes, it protects against “attacks” from outside, but it’s naive to expect they dont have another way in which goes beyond LetsEncrypt.
That loophole is Google and probably cloudflare. Google has their own DNS service, a script tag on nearly every website, half the mobile phone market while being the default search engine on the other half, and provides email to the majority of people. Even if you try not to use their services, they still have an enormous amount of information about you.
Any Govt agency with sufficient power can go to LetsEncrypt and have them either decrypt everything or issue specific certificates that can be decrypted and transparently allow man in the middle monitoring. That so much of the internet is using LetsEncrypt makes it highly likely this is all going on. It’s technically possible and the Govt wouldn’t allow LetsEncrypt to operate without being able to do this. Really this is true with all devices and encryption allowed to be sold. Unless you secretly meet all their demands they control all the required certifications and access to be able to sell your products, list them on the app stores, etc. It’s just a good rule of thumb to consider everything has this starting point unless you design and build the entire hardware and software stack to ensure nothing like this can be done. But you’ll never be able to sell it.
Fortunately, that’s not how it works.
The private key is created on your server, not by Let’s encrypt, and it’s never transferred to them. Nobody can decrypt your data.
Certbot (the official ACME client) is open source, but you’re also welcome to use any other client of your choosing, or make your own. The secrets never leave your server.
Unless the NSA has working powerful quantum computers that can break public key encryption, that they are successfully hiding from the public, they wouldn’t be able to break let’s encrypt certificates backed public key encryption, the math just doesn’t math. It would still take the most powerful super computers millions of years to break RSA 2048.
There’s a reason they want to make encryption illegal, instead of just letting us trust it like sheep. Thankfully, we don’t have to trust anyone, it’s all verifiable math.
You’re not understanding Certificate Authorities or what certificate pinning does to stop man in the middle impersonation of firewall traffic. You have no understanding of what the Government is able to do to your devices and internet connection. You don’t have to take my word for it, I don’t care what you think. You just haven’t been a target to understand.
'Muricans are so racist, we heard “orange chicken” and thought they were talking about China. 🤣
I do think we’ll end up scrambling for alternatives at some point, so better to do it now.
every single accusation is an admission
There are some commercial Certificate Authorities that offer free certificates. But in contrast Let’s Encrypt is a non-profit.
- ZeroSSL (Austria)
- Actalis (Italy)
commercial
free certificates
How do they make money?
ZeroSSL is probably what OP is looking for
I thought zerossl used let’s encrypt behind the scenes (for their free certs at least).
Edit: they don’t mention that on their website, perhaps they don’t.
Also the controlling party in Italy is practically neo-fascist and Austria is also sliding there again with their Nazi party like AfD in Germany and VB in Belgium getting a huge portion of votes.
I don’t see how it is that much better than a US non- profit.
I think the core thing is that you have to know of a bunch of different CA options and switch when necessary or on a compromised CA.
Both Italy and Austria are EU member states , fall under the GDPR AND NIS2 and while both government(even under the FPÖ) have their downsides neither has legislation that is even remotely close to what the US even have today (and had for decades) and unlike the US both countries still have a very well working judical system and the ECJ.
So. Yes. While not perfect, their situation is massively better than a US non for profit. Total different league. Not even in the same ballpark.
It is. Most EU countries build on a strong legal system of separation of powers etc. that makes it hard to dismantle democracy with the alacrity MAGA is currently doing it in the USA.
But nevertheless, we’re all aware of the rise of fascism in Europe and are extremely worried.
You must be joking.
And you must not have read the relevant US laws.
The thing is, the US is already fascist. Austria (current day) would be an improvement.
Also, you know the downfall of Autistici/Inventati - No - check my post history. One of the events that happened is that US owned PIR removed one of the domain names since they own .org. One less US entity, one less point of failure.
Simi-related fun fact.
The biggest contributor to TOR is the CIA. They funded it’s creation and are primarily responsible for maintaining it to this day.
The CIA maintains TOR as a way for spies to pass information over the internet. They make it public because if only spies used TOR it would be trivial to catch them. So it’s in their interest that it be public and secure. It’s open source and security experts agree you can trust it.
The CIA, not navy intelligence?
The core principle of Tor, known as onion routing, was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, to protect American intelligence communications online.
I thougnt it was the Navy, not CIA itself
Yeah it was the NRL in Annapolis, Maryland
So since this, according yo you, is a fact, I do suppose you have evidence to this claim? And I’m talking evidence that can be corroborated, not a Facebook post or something from a conspiracy sub, and not “oh man, everybody knows this!” because everybody doesn’t know this.
Crazy that you’re downvoted for asking for sources lol
There’s a thing called search engines, it takes about 20 seconds, much less than waiting for a reply you asked for in a mocking tone. What about “security analysis tor protocol”?
Lost Lemmings?
I don’t think anyone is gonna solve that problem until it’s actually a problem.
It is a problem, and there are solutions.
You say. Confidently. With no receipts.
just read the comments
I don’t think anyone’s going to solve the problem in general, to be honest.
Like, Let’s Encrypts goal is super novel, but also expensive as shit to actually run, and requires a lot of coordination because it needs to be a trust authority. If this ever happened, it would probably be at the backing of some government structure, because I don’t see many people wanting to jump at that as an expense.
Let’s encrypt is very transparent and has been designed to be auditable. What are you worried about exactly?
That the U.S. government can arbitrarily take down websites by revoking certificates issued by let’s encrypt? How obvious can it be? I wondered the same thing as OP months ago. We need european alternatives. I think there are some, have some bookmarked somewhere.
Certificate revocation is a joke and has been for over a decade
Huh, FF on Android doesn’t care.
Most browsers don’t, hence my calling revocation a joke.
So many in this thread are up in arms about something the majority of browsers don’t care about and have actively ignored for as long as I can recall
Yeah, I was just surprised bc the page explicitly lauds FF for checking revocation.
It may only be the desktop version, most mobile browsers aren’t as feature complete as their desktop counterparts.
But, given Google ripped revocation checking out of chromium, I wouldn’t be surprised if they nerfed it in Android too…
If the certificate only lasts two months revocation isn’t necessary, just deny recertification.
And what if you need to get a new certificate?
You go to a different CA
Aren’t we back at OP’s question?
That’s the question of this thread. Yes.
Still American. de-Americanizing the tech stack is a good idea.
Are you trying to solve a technica, or political/moral problem? Let’s Encrypt doesn’t create, see, store or log your private cerficates. So, even if they are in the US, I don’t see a risk, and otherwise, the other parts you use in general are probably vulnerable to the problem even if non-US.
For ex. the US could simply order browsers stop validating any certificates not issues by US companies in browsers. And whoosh. Having a non-US certificate won’t help much there either.
This is nonsense. Firefox is open source, you can just fork it.
uncle sam. audit away. until sam says “give me the keys” and then sam has the keys
The transparency logs would mean that any rouge certificates created would leave a paper trail not to mention there is nothing stopping them from issuing a certificate for any domain of their choosing
I think Let’s Encrypt will stay safe for quite a while, but unfortunately because of the political climate we’re in right now, it may not stay safe in the future.
This is why I never even started using Letsencrypt; looking at the fine print, you actually enter into some kind of contract
with some US entityunder US law, which I don’t want even if it’s the coolest of all FOSS foundations.Here’s a site that has some info:
https://www.eurotoolkit.eu/categories/certificate-authority-ca
I have used certum.pl for years and it looks like I might go back to them soon because my VPS provider doesn’t offer bundled certs anymore.I used to pay €40/year iirc.
I suspect it’s gotten more expensive though.edit:
oh looks like ZeroSSL are doing it letsencrypt-style with Acme protocol for €0.edit2:
No, not more expensive. Some of the providers in the above link are labyrinthine and I couldn’t even find a Pricing section - usually a sign that it’s too expensive at least for a normal consumer - but others offer yearly certs for as little as €30 (taxes not included).edit3:
Yeah some people are going to have a hard time accepting that a contract with a for-profit company under EU jurisdiction might be preferable to a contract with a non-profit under US jurisdiction.I’ve been using ZeroSSL for over 5 years and can attest that they are friendly in that I have literally never seen or heard from them.
I’ve set up and cancelled multiple domains in this time, and have had one domain running for the entirety of my time with ZeroSSL.
I don’t think you (OP) are gonna find much better than a for-profit business with a good track record if you’re unwilling to use Letsencrypt.
This is good to know.
They do sound good, but it’s worth pointing out that for a LE equivalent, unlimited 90 day certs, ZeroSSL would cost 180 Euro per year, that’s 15 per month. I couldn’t find another registry with a comparable offer. They always follow the ancient model of paying for every cert or getting a wildcard cert you have to manually install everywhere. To me, that model is dead. Automatic provisioning and renewal of certs is a must.
What? I’m not paying a dime and I’m not manually inserting certificates.
I’m just repeating what their website says.
I think you should look deeper. Quick google search gave me
Oh, no, I was talking about the price. I saw that they have ACME. From that European registry list they seem to be the only ones. But the plan that offers unlimited certs over ACME, equal to LE, costs 15 Euro per month.
I assume you are correct and anybody can get a cert (with max. 1 wildcard presumably) for (again presumably) one site for free?
This @state_electrician is very insistent; do you have any idea what exactly costs €15/month (according to them)? What could they mean by “LE (LetsEncrypt) equivalent”?
They seem to claim that the free cert offer is only for a limited time?edit:
no, they explained themselves. Apparently LE gives as many free certs for as many domains as you want to any one user.I am referring to this: https://zerossl.com/pricing
Under the section “ZeroSSL Certificates” it says for the free tier “3 90-Day Certificates” and for the cheapest paid option at 15 Euro per month “∞ 90-Day Certificates” (∞ being the infinity sign). The latter is what I currently get for free from Let’s Encrypt. So to get the same kind of service, I would have to pay ZeroSSL about 180 Euro a year. Which is something I am currently not willing to do, as all my ~40 certificates are only for myself.
I think there is some confusion because I have had more than 4 domains at one time and they did not complain about it. 2 of them were wildcards. Possibly a “90 day certificate” is something specific that they are offering?
Wait, you’re getting free SSL certs that don’t have to be renewed (albeit automated) every 90 days?
ZeroSSL costs 180 per year for unlimited 90 day certs. I get the independence from US-based services, but I don’t want to drop that kind of money on my toy domains.
I think you misunderstood something there; they’re very explicitely offering free certs.
I just went 90% through the process (I might need them anyhow later this year), it’s like this:
What you say is a PRO feature, unlimited certs with one account, is not meant as “unlimited in time” but “unlimited number of certs at any given time”.Yeah, that’s what I meant. An unlimited number of 90 day certs, automatically renewable through ACME. That’s what Let’s Encrypt offers and that’s what I’d need in another cert provider.
lol ok
It’s proven then: Letsencrypt is bigger and better than anything any European even for profit company has to offer.
WTF are you on about?
I think that ZeroSSL are owned by an American company.
Which is in turn owned by a Swedish company.
Can’t speak for OP, but for me it’s important that with e.g. Letsencrypt, I’m entering a contract under US law, and with ZeroSSL it’s under EU/Austrian law.
What risk are you trying to mitigate, specifically?
If it’s the CA taking over your site, control over your CA specifically doesn’t really give any advantage to an attacker (they would have to hijack traffic and provide a new certificate - nobody will notice if the certificate is from a different CA).
Note that your CA cannot decrypt the exchanges between your server and its clients.
It opens the possibility of a man-in-the-middle attack.
which is still there if you are not using lets encrypt, because they can strongarm them to make a fake cert for your domain, and install a proxy repackaging HTTPS traffic with the fake certificate. all browsers trust the lets encrypt root certificate, so they won’t see anything suspicious.
the only thing there today to detect this (but not avoid) is certificate transparency logs. all modern certificates are required to be added to this log, for the CA to remain compliant. but browsers are not checking the logs, that would be a lot of additional traffic and how do they decide if a certificate was created maliciously? also, lets encrypt could afford being noncompliant, browser vendors can’t realistically just distrust their root certificate, many sites would become inaccessible.
Oh snap! That definitely sounds possible. Found more info about it.
tl;dr: Either the attack is ineffective against some browsers that check the certificate transparency logs (like Chrome), or the attack is visible and the CA will lose all its credibility (hopefully being removed from the browsers).
it seems Firefox started doing the CT validation too, without needing to contact the CT log service: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Defenses/Certificate_Transparency#browser_requirements
and details: https://wiki.mozilla.org/SecurityEngineering/Certificate_Transparency
this sounds important:
This information has a 10 week expiration time. That is, if 10 weeks have passed since the information has been updated (typically by updating Firefox itself), the implementation will no longer enforce certificate transparency.
this also means, it can’t truly verify SCT’s that were issued since the last browser update?
Maybe I’m mistaken but aren’t the logs cryptography verifiable? (As in you can’t create a rouge cert without it creating a trace)
apparently certs can have a cryptographic proof of having been included in the CT logs. but what do browsers do if the letsencrypt cert has no such proof?
You can test that on this site:
Edit: no, it doesn’t. Looking at the comments below, it’s public key crypto.
Original comment:
The problem is that if that is your threat model, then the VPS provider, ISP, and literally everything between you and letsencrypt can pull a conpromised key fro letsencrypt.
This actually happened btw, an xmpp server was attacked this way, they compromised not the server itself, but the VPS provider MITMed their traffic: https://www.devever.net/~hl/xmpp-incident
If your threat model involves this, then the only solution is Tor, which eliminates these requirements of trust.
Yep, that’s what I described and any CA accepted by the client can do it
Are you sure they can’t decrypt? They have your certificate after all.Besides, if the Orange has a bad day, he can ban certificates export or just for a single company or individual.Edit: First two sentences were stupid, I apologize.
Yes, the private key never leaves your machine.
You send them a certificate signing request with your public key, they put their verification stamp on it and send it to you.
The only part they have to play is verifying that your certificate is trusted by a root certificate.
The CA cannot decypt: they don’t have the secret key which only the server has. When requesting a new certificate from the CA, the server generated a secret key (aka private key) and then generated a derived public key that goes into a Certificate Signing Request (CSR). The CSR is what the CA receives, not the secret key, and then the CA returns the certificate file to the server, which has been endorsed by the CA and thus trusted by the user base.
Phrased another way, a certificate is the instrument that confirms that a purported public key can in-fact be safely used, and that no MITM attack is happening (assuming you trust the CA that signed the cert). But once you’ve confirmed the public key, the rest of the cryptography is public key cryptography, meaning the secrecy of the secret key is the whole game.
Yep, you guys are right.
The certificate is only used for authentication. The actual data is encrypted with a temporary symmetric key that is generated via a diffie-hellman exchange
Even if they had your private key they still wouldn’t be able to decrypt the data
deleted by creator
A MITM doesn’t require decrypting. It just requires telling a convincing enough lie to each side of a conversation that they think they’re talking to the other party. Then you end up encrypting to their key which they can just read. That’s different from breaking the encryption.
Are you sure they can’t decrypt?
No, and none of the state actors who do that kind of stuff will ever tell you. Watch The Imitation Game for a good/bad time and some context.
If you had a break for the modern crypto schemes and published it right now you would shut down all digital commerce, a lot of the spy traffic if not most of it1, and nothing could be started back up again until everything was redone from scratch. Best hope would be that the post quantum algorithms2 the cryptographers have aren’t succeptible to whatever you did to break the existing algorithms. It’d take a bit to get the software implementations and keys in place, etc. The hardware stuff would take longer.
- [1] The stuff using One Time Pads would still be fine, but its limitations wouldn’t take the place all of all the rest of it.
- [2] The rollout of post quantum algorithms is going on now on a more accelerated schedule than originally planned.
Quantum computers only threaten asymmetric ciphers, so every symmetric cipher is still safe, not just one-time-pads but things like AES and ChaCha20 aren’t affected at all.
Ah. That’s a misunderstanding on my part, and a good news story. Still don’t want to wake up tomorrow and see a published AES break, though.
They don’t have your private key
The private key isn’t used for encryption
deleted by creator
First let’s identify what parts of the world are free-er than the US (for a certificate).
Malta or Cyprus maybe? My first thought is places where dodgy people do dodgy shit, like gambling.
is it possible to get the eff to move elsewhere?
And give up the best weather and access to 5 star restaurants in the world? Surely you jest!
It is surprisingly easy to add a custom CA to phones and laptops. When I migrated to services using one with names like
thisservice.lanI thought it would be a lot harder. I just have a generation script that makes a new cert and I throw it in NGINX.Just don’t get too close to TV’s or streaming boxes. Wildly different levels of hell
Very true. I do have a let’s encrypt wildcard cert that I also use with internal IPs for instances like this. But most of my items don’t require that.
awesome, I just setup traefik / le on an old sort domain of mine and make everything inside support https.
Honestly, I was hoping to add client only certs on my jellyfin and open it to friends an family, but none of their streaming devices support it.
Yea, I’ve recently learned LineageOS has an AndroidTV version that runs on a lot of devices, including the Pi. Been considering investigating that.
You need to restructure your priorities.
Or use a ca, vps and dns provider that’s hostile to the west.
It’s not a question of supporting “freedom” and if you insist that it is, I will gladly provide all those services to you for a slight markup (price of freedom!).
Why not use veracrypt instead?
Let’s Encrypt is a certificate authority, the one making sure the green lock on HTTPS sites stays green.
Veracrypt is an encryption software.
Didn’t know that. Thanks.
I just self-host Bitwarden. I’d rather not allow the CIA to snoop on my passwords, and if law enforcement serves me a warrant, then I can furnish a list…though, I’m sure they’d just go to the service and ask them because “fuck you” of course.
you don’t know how bitwarden works, do you?
Nope, America bad! CIA has magic that let’s them break modern encryption because they employ John Hackerman!
The amount of FUD in this thread is nuts, but I expect that from Internet people with very strong opinions about topics that theyre not particularly well informed on.
I mean, “america” (specifically USA) bad, but that user has no idea bitwarden encrypts the password before sending it to the server.
I’m not going to argue the USA is good at all, but yeah that was my point. People are freaking out because of the FUD going around about the capabilities of spy agencies, and the basic lack of curiosity to understand something even on the most basic level.
Like honestly, people should be more worried about the owners of their browsers, since they actually can mark a certificate or chain as untrusted and have it mean something.