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Let's Encrypt Is Now In Public Beta (eff.org)

Posted by timothy on from the first-person-plural dept.

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.

5 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Very short certs. by gantzm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They really want you to automate this. From the web site:

    Let’s Encrypt CA issues short lived certificates (90 days). Make sure you renew the certificates at least once in 3 months.

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    Excessive forking causes un-wanted children.
    1. Re:Very short certs. by kthreadd · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So, hands up. Who has ever forgot to renew a three year cert before it expired?

  2. I was looking forward to this... by jez9999 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Unfortunately, their MAXIMUM length of certificate is 90 days and it ain't getting longer; if anything they want to make them shorter in duration. So anyone who doesn't want to or can't, for whatever reason, run some cronjob on their server to auto-renew their certificates should give these guys a miss. Great shame that they let their "automate everything or GTFO" ideology override many people's legitimate need or desire for annual certificates.

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    == Jez ==
    Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
  3. Re:But Why? by blackiner · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:But Why? by itsdapead · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.