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.
Let’s encrypt is very transparent and has been designed to be auditable. What are you worried about exactly?
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.
Lost Lemmings?
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).
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?
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
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?
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.
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 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
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.
They don’t have your private key
deleted by creator
The private key isn’t used for encryption
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 7 acronyms.
[Thread #107 for this comm, first seen 19th Sep 2026, 15:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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.
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?
How is this related to the OP?
There are some commercial Certificate Authorities that offer free certificates. But in contrast Let’s Encrypt is a non-profit.
- ZeroSSL (Austria)
- Actalis (Italy)
ZeroSSL is probably what OP is looking for
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.
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 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.
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.
Letsencrypt can be directly forced to revoke certificates by the US. Organisations outside of the US are less vulnerable against that.
That would be just a nuisance until a new certificate is generated with another vendor (possibly not for free, but cheap enough).
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.
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.
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
Aren’t the .country domains managed by the countries?
@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.
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.
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.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 than anything any European even for profit company has to offer.
WTF are you on about?
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.
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 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 cerst are only for a limited time, according to the site?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’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.
This is good to know.
@Sibbo
I use Italian Actalis (https://www.actalis.com/) with Caddy even if I do not think that is free-er
