Happy birthday to Let’s Encrypt !

Huge thanks to everyone involved in making HTTPS available to everyone for free !

  • 0x01@lemmy.ml
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    11 days ago

    Man I love let’s encrypt, remember how terrible ssl was before the project landed?

    • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.world
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      11 days ago

      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…

    • pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.frOP
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      11 days ago

      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.

    • leisesprecher@feddit.org
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      11 days ago

      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.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        People behave as if having a green lock icon were enough to consider you’re safe.

        People behave as if there were not multiple cases of abuse of PKI.

        People behave as if all those whistleblowing cases exposing widespread illegal activities by the state were not treated as normal, except those exposing them being chased and vilified.

        What I’m trying to say is that we’re past the stage where techno-optimism about the Internet made sense. They just say in the news that abusing you is good, and everybody just takes it.

      • xthexder@l.sw0.com
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        11 days ago

        Oh man, I forgot about startssl until just now. I definitely had a few of those certs. If you wanted something fancy like a wildcard cert back then, you were paying $$$

        • lud@lemm.ee
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          11 days ago

          Luckily, wildcard certs are insecure and should be avoided.

          • xthexder@l.sw0.com
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            11 days ago

            Wildcard certs are perfectly fine. Your own instance lemm.ee is using one right now.

            Obviously there could be issues if subdomains are shared with other sites, but if the whole domain is owned by 1 person, what does it matter?

            • lud@lemm.ee
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              11 days ago

              If one system is somehow compromised, the attacker could effectively impersonate all the systems on your entire domain if they had the wildcard cert. Maybe it’s not a huge deal for individuals but for companies or other organisations it could be extremely dangerous.

              If someone wanted a wildcard cert at work I would be very cautious before I even considered issuing one. Unfortunately there are a few wildcard certs on our domain, but those are from before my time.

              • pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.frOP
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                10 days ago

                Having a certificate for any subdomain has implications for other sibling domains, even without a wildcard certificate.

                By default, web browsers are a lot less strict about Same Origin Policy for sibling domains, which enables a lot of web-based attacks (like CSRF and cookie stealing) if your able to hijack any subdomain

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      When you have to use it, then yes. But in general standard technologies of today are mostly rigged.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      10 days ago

      I remember the days when each site that wanted to use SSL had to have a dedicated IP.