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.
'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.
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.
I thougnt it was the Navy, not CIA itself
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.
Lost Lemmings?
Let’s encrypt is very transparent and has been designed to be auditable. What are you worried about exactly?
Still American. de-Americanizing the tech stack is a good idea.
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
That’s the question of this thread. Yes.
Aren’t we back at OP’s question?
There are some commercial Certificate Authorities that offer free certificates. But in contrast Let’s Encrypt is a non-profit.
- ZeroSSL (Austria)
- Actalis (Italy)
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.
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.
commercial
free certificates
How do they make money?
Usually they make money with extended certificates where they not only offer a certificate for example.com but also certify that it belongs to Example Ltd.
Those extended certificates used to show the company name next to address bars, but I don’t think browsers do that anymore.
a certificate for example.com
also certify that it belongs to Example Ltd.
I thought that was the whole point of a certificate, to show that the website belongs to the company? Or nah?
Nah, the point is to encrypt the traffic and tell you what you are receiving really comes from example.com and not an evil third party.
Ah, right. That’s the primary purpose, thank you for the reminder! 🙏
It’s actually to prove that a web server belongs to (or is trusted by for delivering their content) a specific website.
qualified certificates go a step further, by proving that a web server belongs to a specific company or a real person. but that’s costly, because verification is inherently more difficult.
Thanks for the additional details!
ZeroSSL is probably what OP is looking for
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.
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.
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
They don’t have your private key
The private key isn’t used for encryption
deleted by creator
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?
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.
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 don’t think anyone is gonna solve that problem until it’s actually a problem.
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.
It is a problem, and there are solutions.
You say. Confidently. With no receipts.
just read the comments
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.
@Sibbo I do not see any problem with Letsencrypt. Any CA which is widely trusted has to follow the same rules. This rules are set up by the CA Browser Forum. Which metadata does LE collect? My server’s IP address, domain and subdomain, mail address. These are logged in the CT logs. Every CA has to log all certificates in a public CT log. Regardless which CA I choose, these data are public. There are not any critical data or metadata that LE can collect.
Letsencrypt can be directly forced to revoke certificates by the US. Organisations outside of the US are less vulnerable against that.
And ICAAN can hand your domain over to US law enforcement regardless of the TLD and your register.
Is that also part of your decision tree?
Is this accurate? Like, I know what you’re meaning, but I’m pretty sure it’s not ICANN doing it, and more so your domain registrar handing it over to the US government.
I think the most control that ICANN has over it is they could theoretically, if they wanted to, delete an entire top level domain. Since they do control the DNS root, but that is the most that they control from what I understand.
I don’t know if they have the ability to delete or transfer control over an individual domain on legal request. I think that’s outside of what their actual system allows for.
ICANN can (theoretically) not force anyone to deregister your domain. If your stack is all outside the US, and everyone collectively decided to disobey the US, the Internet’s decentralization would be true.
The hard part about building a decentralized network is finding out where to hide the centralization.
For the Internet, the centralization is hidden in the IP block and DNS Zone delegation. After this is done, that region is decentralized. A/I’s problem was that the registry for .org is a subsidiary of IANA. With EU servers, EU DNS and a EU domain, EU clients cannot be prevented from connecting solely from the outside. The US would need a collaborator.
That is all well and good, but we have many instances of domains being pulled from people because of court ruling and your register is not going to defy a court ruling for your €17/year domain.
Maybe it should be! We need non-fascis-adjacent DNS roots.
I worked on the Yeti Project a while ago, which showed that an independent group of operators can run root servers.
Managing the contents of the root zone was out of scope… we used the ICANN root.
There are authorityless blockchain-backed name registration services. In general, it is important whether you can localize a resource. If you can easily find it, the name doesn’t have to human-readable.
The root (haha) of needing better DNSes is because the ones that are are tied to technofascists and their ilk: techbros, nazis, psycopaths. So using something with blockchain sounds quite missing the point.
You do understand that a P2P proof of work backed global store is just infrastructure? And as egalitarian as DNS servers? And it doesn’t have the storage/compute footprint of a full bitcoin node.
The space of human-readable names is quite small, so proof of work is needed to protect it from being flooded. An alternative is to have your servers have names to be or derived from their public keys, or dissolve content from its location. Which brings its own problems.
if its not human readable, how will people know its the place they want to go to? I don’t think bookmarked onionsites is a particularly good idea
In order to find content, we used to have webrings, directory services, and then search engines. Most people don’t enter URLs by hand.
Aren’t the .country domains managed by the countries?
Who all get that authority from ICAAN
No-one did and you can basically establish you fully independent DNS. The DNS unter ICANN control is just the default.
That would be just a nuisance until a new certificate is generated with another vendor (possibly not for free, but cheap enough).
@Sibbo Of course. Actually, there are 200 million active certificates issued by Letsencrypt. Revoking them, 200 million websites would be down. 200 million websites all over the world, including US. I don’t think this is a realistic scenario.
If you are worried about that, you should avoid any software developed in US. You should avoid any software which itself or its sources are hosted in US. Mastodon is available on Github, this is Microsoft. US authorities may force Github to shutdown or infiltrate the hosted sources with spyware.
Actually the problem is that they are too widespread. if something happened, and they started creating fake certificates, for outside force or otherwise, they can’t just be blocked because literally half of the internet or more breaks. what’s worse, if browser vendors trued that, people would be downgrading their browser to the last version accepting it, and become exposed to publicly revealed security vulnerabilities. not all because its a bit complicated, but enough would do to have it cause an even greater problem.
You do make a good point. However, Let’s encrypt is run by the IRSG which is a non profit focused on improving internet security. They are the ones who are pushing for shorter certificate lifetimes among other things.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CA (SSL) Certificate Authority DNS Domain Name Service/System ISP Internet Service Provider VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.
[Thread #107 for this comm, first seen 19th Sep 2026, 15:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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.
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!
@Sibbo
I use Italian Actalis (https://www.actalis.com/) with Caddy even if I do not think that is free-erI 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.
How is this related to the OP?
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.
