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Let's Encrypt Is Now In Public Beta (eff.org)
Peter Eckersley writes: As of today, Let's Encrypt is in Public Beta. If you're comfortable running beta software that may have a few bugs and rough edges, you can use it to instantly obtain and install certificates for any HTTPS website or TLS service. You can find installation instructions here.
There is a pretty writeup about modern TLS issues on lwn: http://lwn.net/Articles/664385...
It seems that certificate revocation is not working particularly well in practice. The 90 day duration is meant to help with this, you can simply let the certificate expire.
I understand that the target audience is admins, and that this is beta, but really?
Have you ever had to generate a certificate request, get it signed by a CA and install it in your web server? Its not rocket science but its certainly tedious with a dense jargon thicket to battle through.
./letsencrypt-auto certonly --webroot -w /var/www/example -d example.com -d www.example.com -w /var/www/thing -d thing.is -d m.thing.is
...is improvement beyond recognition.
Anyway, there's a lot of infrastructure behind that command line that should make it easy for the likes of CPanel, Plesk or maybe even Wordpress to wrap it in a nice point-and-drool dialog.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Bear in mind that current free certificates from the likes of StartSSL expire after 1 year anyway - and are at least 4 times more hassle to obtain and install than Lets Encrypt is shaping up to be.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.