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105

Paid SSL vs Letsencrypt (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm curious what the benefits are of paying for SSL certificates vs using a free provider such as letsencrypt.

What exactly are you trusting a cert provider with and what are the security implications? What attack vectors do you open yourself up to when trusting a certificate authority with your websites' certificates?

In what way could it benefit security and/or privacy to utilize a paid service?

And finally, which paid SSL providers are considered trustworthy?

I know Digicert is a big player, but their prices are insane. Comodo seems like a good affordable option, but is it a trustworthy company?

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 2 months ago (15 children)

AFAIK, the only reason not to use Letsencrypt are when you are not able to automate the process to change the certificate.

As the paid certificates are valid for 12 month, you have to change them less often than a letsencrypt certificate.

At work, we pay something like 30-50€ for a certificate for a year. As changing certificates costs, it is more economical to buy a certificate.

But generally, it is best to use letsencrypt when you can automate the process (e.g. with nginx).

As for the question of trust: The process of issuing certificates is done in a way that the certificate authority never has access to your private key. You don't trust the CA with anything (except your payment data maybe).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There are more reasons, as LetsEncrypt might be more restrictive on what you can get (for example, you cant get a certificate for an IP address from them). But, as 99.99% of usecases do not require anything like that, go with letsencrypt until you know of a reason not to.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

No proper CA should give out a certificate for an IP, that's a no go by the common rules.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I see why automatically giving them out (like in ACME) would be a bad idea, but other than that, why not? Even https://1.1.1.1 has a DigiCert cert.

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