This letter was originally published in our 2024 Annual Report.
The past year at ISRG has been a great one and I couldn’t be more proud of our staff, community, funders, and other partners that made it happen. Let’s Encrypt continues to thrive, serving more websites around the world than ever before with excellent security and stability. Our understanding of what it will take to make more privacy-preserving metrics more mainstream via our Divvi Up project is evolving in important ways.
Lets Encrypt certs tend to be renewed by a cronjob, anyway. The advantage is that if someone gets your cert without your knowledge, they have, at most, six days to make use of it.
If someone got a hold of your certificate that is the security equivalent of the entire company being on fire. If they got my certs they likely will have my credit cards, my birth certificate, and my youngest daughter.
Thank God though that I can renew my certificates every 6 days, that will definitely help sole the problem.
Yeah and that is something everyone already is doing anyway, I never said anything about not doing that.
I said that lowering the amount of days to 6 won’t do anything to increase security. Then why not lowering it to 1 day? That ought to be super secure now! Why not 1 hour or 1 minute? Super duper secure?
What is the actual added security benefit here? Because so far all I’ve seen is security theatre, something unexpected from let’sencrypt
What is the use case or benefit for the server admin?
as a server admin I wouldn’t want to keep renewing my cert.
can anyone help to explain?
Lets Encrypt certs tend to be renewed by a cronjob, anyway. The advantage is that if someone gets your cert without your knowledge, they have, at most, six days to make use of it.
That makes little sense. If they can get my certificate then I have different problems that ,a 6 day turnaround isn’t going to solve
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
Presumably, you’ve patched up whatever hole let them in.
… Seriously?
If someone got a hold of your certificate that is the security equivalent of the entire company being on fire. If they got my certs they likely will have my credit cards, my birth certificate, and my youngest daughter.
Thank God though that I can renew my certificates every 6 days, that will definitely help sole the problem.
Thats an interesting position.
I dont keep my credit card information on the load balancer that holds my certs.
that’s… not how SSL works.
I think the implication is the infiltrator would have a lot of access already.
OK. Whatever hypothetical we want to think about here, we still want our cert to be renewed.
Yeah and that is something everyone already is doing anyway, I never said anything about not doing that.
I said that lowering the amount of days to 6 won’t do anything to increase security. Then why not lowering it to 1 day? That ought to be super secure now! Why not 1 hour or 1 minute? Super duper secure?
What is the actual added security benefit here? Because so far all I’ve seen is security theatre, something unexpected from let’sencrypt
If they get it without your knowledge, what are the odds they can get the new one too?
If they got it with your knowledge, can’t you just revoke the old one?
deleted by creator
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
I’ve been using the Swiss Cheese Model for my sandwiches and they’ve been a disaster.
You have to scramble the slices, otherwise the holes all line up and your mayonnaise falls out.
6 days to do what you want to do to the page and its visitors. I guess that’s good?