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?
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?
Let’s encrypt is very transparent and has been designed to be auditable. What are you worried about exactly?
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.
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
@flandish @possiblylinux127 Letsencrypt just has the public keys, no private keys. If Letsencrypt gives my public keys to sam, it does not matter, because public keys are public. My private key is under my administration only.
and the backdoor?
@flandish Which backdoor? When I request a CA for a certificate, I send the public key to the CA. The CA does a validation and signs the certificate.
The CA does not see any traffic from my server. A man-in-the-middle needs my private key, which is under my administration. If I loose my private key, it does not matter if the certificate is signed by a US based CA or an European CA.
@flandish If US authorities want to fake my server, they can use any CA, regardless which CA I originally used.
Of course, US authorities can force Letsencrypt to revoke my certificates and block any renewing. This is very unlikely to happen. If it happens, I have to change my CA. There would be a downtime for my private services, but there is no data corruption or data loss on my servers.
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@flandish This is no backdoor. This is an denial of service. It’s a big difference. I have to estimate the risk and decide if I want to take it. ZeroSSL uses the infrastructure of Sectigo, an US company. Sectigo can pull the plug very easily. So it is no alternative. Maybe Actalis or Certum are good alternatives. But the government of Poland has not been unproblematic in the past.
Said backdoor isn’t possible with the current day key exchange process. Without the servers in use private key, the most law agencies can do without acquiring the private key is force the CA to revoke a cert, which will disallow properly configured clients from accessing and transferring data with the server.
LE doesn’t have enough information to recreate the private key based off the public key, the only key distributed during the CSR process is the servers public key via a certificate signing request which is signed using your private key, which the CA then signs with it’s own intermediate key (which is signed by it’s root server certificate) and hands back to the private server.
The CA doesn’t have the ability to create that private key, and as such doesn’t have a way to decrypt traffic that is using that key. There is no concern for a backdoor in that process.
In order for the “backdoor” to exist, they would need to either copy the private key as part of the signing process (which it doesn’t), or somehow force the server admin to use a new private key (that the CA also holds) or somehow compromise the servers key generation process to allow for an escrow on the private key when it was generated which would allow the CA to be able to recreate the private key using the master & public key.
Now don’t take me wrong, you can still have a MiTM impersonation attack or a full impersonation bypass by the CA issuing a new certificate and having the DNS registrar have the web address go to a new server that is using the new key but, that’s not something the CA alone has the capability of doing, and any traffic that is issued to the original server still wouldn’t be compromised, its just clients visiting your site will end up at the other site and as such will end up using keys that the other side generated instead of your own keys and additionally said new keys would also be appearing in Certificate transparency logs, or modern day clients would refuse to use them.
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.
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…
Orion browser (maybe safari?) on iOS detected the revoked certificate, and asked me to confirm before accessing the website while warning about the dangers.
Does regular safari show the same prompt? Afaik, browsers on iOS are safari reskins, so I’m curious if they added his cert in directly again, or if the onion browser actually follows standards the os browser doesn’t.
Yes, but safari doesn’t even let me ignore the warning, it has a explanation in detail, and only allows closing the website.
You didn’t look hard enough. My router cert isn’t valid and I have to bypass the warning every time.
Maybe there’s a special case for local subnets?
Here’s what shows up for me (in portuguese):
Clicking on more details, only allows me to check the certificate:
Here’s the translated details:
Said certificate:
Edit: on the latest iOS version (27) btw.
Thanks for the proof! I stand corrected! I see basically the same but after the view link there is another think that bypasses it.
Must be difference between expired vs compromised cert.
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
That’s the question of this thread. Yes.
Aren’t we back at OP’s question?