Stale news. Mozilla introduced a new solution for certificate revocation that solves nearly all the problems with old methods. While it hasn't really taken off outside of Firefox, that's mostly because Google and Apple haven't embraced it because they are too busy trying to shorten certificate life unnecessarily.
> Questions come up: do you block a request if you fail to download the latest CRL? How often do you refresh it?
In the before times we left settings like this up to competent system administrators to decide based on risk and not hardcoded by a handful of people at Google.
That is right, but one thing is not like the other. You have always been free to set expiry low on your own certificates, but that is not the same as enforcing it on everyones ceritificate.
Let's Encrypt is operating normally. If you're having trouble, please post the details on the community forum so that folks can help you out. There is external monitoring in place.
I use acme.sh for certs on my personal server and was a little surprised when it started using ZeroSSL by default. Despite being more "corporate" I decided to roll with it and it's worked just fine.
None. Big tech intentionally made Let's Encrypt a single point of giant failure.
> And in case none exists, what does it take to build one?
A new Internet and Web standards stack. The whole problem is self-imposed -- we could have published self-signed Ed25519 keys on the DNS instead, and the result would be more secure than whatever it is we have now.
Do you remember the early days of SSL certificates? It took an act of god just to get a certificate: verification rituals like faxing corporate paper work, phone calls, manually reissuing certs because someone forgot the "www", forgotten renewals...
The banner's colour is based on the "Incident Status;" it's green because services are currently operational. It would be yellow or red if the impact were more severe.
Using only color to communicate the status is confusing. If you want to communicate something, it's often best to just say it. The color can be a visual reinforcement of that. Then your explanation would not be needed.
But that's not were the confusion is created. I don't even see the status field on mobile without scrolling. You don't have a missing status field, you have too much confusion, because the field and/or the color have a placement mismatch.
That explains why one of my IoT vendors is using an expired certificate.
I wish Firefox would just give a mild warning for a recently expired certificate, instead of treating it the same as a true man-in-the-middle attach. It's not like someone who couldn't factor the private key in 200 days could in 201 days or even 300 days.
I'm convinced that we'd have better security, if we didn't have so much security theater. You'd think TLS is useless, from the warning my phone gives if I connected to a public Wi-Fi AP, but then again there's nothing in TLS (or WPA) that prevents it from being used in a way that is completely useless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1si1y5lvkk
> That explains why one of my IoT vendors is using an expired certificate.
I don't think so. There was a dip in success rates for 90 minutes today, but nobody should be renewing their certificate within 90 minutes of expiration. If you're at that point, something went wrong weeks ago.
Mostly 90 days, and we recommend renewing at 60 days for 90 day certs. That gives more than four weeks of leeway.
If you're one of the few early adopters of short-lived (6-day) certs you should renew at 3 days, giving you 3 days for a successful renewal. A 90 minute outage, even if it was a full outage, would not interfere with a successful renewal.
90 days moving to 45 but you can and should renew earlier than that. Automating this process means that you should be request a new certificates roughly 60 days (or 30 soon) after the issuance of the previous certificate. That way you would have plenty of time to deal with renewal issues. The process for renewal should have back off and retries built in. This prevents a situation where a down time for the issuer means that your production environments are non-functional.
"nobody should be renewing their certificate within 90 minutes of expiration"
You obviously haven't worked with hardware guys.
"I mean, what's the point of those last 30 days if you need to renew it 30 days before expiration? Why not just renew it before it expires? If I'm required to renew it 30 days before the expiration date then the expiration date is a lie, isn't it?"
> If I'm required to renew it 30 days before the expiration date then the expiration date is a lie, isn't it?
Many countries won't let you enter if your passport expires less than 6 months after your planned departure date. Basically the effective validity of a passport is 0.5 years less than the period you pay for.
Certificate expiry is less severe than an untrusted issuer or a host mismatch.
The former is most likely an administrative error (ie: someone forgot to renew, or the auto-renew is failing). The latter is more likely to be an MTM attack.
I'm not sure how you would use an expired cert as an attack vector. By loading in an old cert into an expired domain so you could spoof older content?
Revocation information may not be available for expired certificates. Not that it matters much because the last time I checked revocation didn't really work for non-expired certificates either, but I think that (+ the risk of people treating expired certificates as worthless and thus increasing the risk of exposure) is the main reason.
Also of course domains changing owners, but again... I don't think we have good monitoring for that during the current long lifetime, so maybe a grace period where a warning is shown but it's easier to click through would be a good idea. Perhaps combined with a requirement to keep revocation information (and keep revoking expired certificates) X days past expiry.
But it's only the extreme warning that alerts the website (usually via a customer complaining) that the cert hasn't been renewed. Having the lesser warning just kicks the can down the road.
The IoT should have updated the certs weeks in advance. If they haven't done it by day 0 then their process is broken and delaying the scary warning to say day +5 won't solve anything.
A warning with a clear clickthrough button would work for alerting - the default TLS warnings are designed to be somewhat hard to bypass to make people think twice.
What might be better is to, in addition to failing hard when the certificate expires, web browsers were to give a 'soft' click-through user warning if the certificate on the site - while still within its validity period - has less than say 7 days to go before expiry.
That's probably long enough for most companies to be alerted to the problem in time and to get their act together to fix the problem.
There are reasons browsers do things the way they do.
Experience and user studies have shown that users have a hard time decoding what error messages mean. "This certificate is expired, but only for a little while" isn't meaningful for people who don't have a mental model of what a certificate is.
Furthermore, "downgrading" warnings increases the incentive to ignore issues, potentially causing more problems down the line.
Let's Encrypt has been working normally for most of the day. There was a ~90 minute period during which some of our users would have received a higher error rate due to upstream networking issues, but the majority of requests were successful even during that period.
It seems our status.io notes are being misinterpreted as much more severe than they were intended to reflect.
Edit: Note that this was written in response to a previous submission title implying that Let's Encrypt was entirely down most of the day.
I'm not sure if your higher error rate is sticky per user or something, but I've tried 10+ times throughout the day and have had 0 successes. They all come back as internal server error. That's why I eventually posted.
It would not have been sticky for the entire day. If it was sticky at all, it would have been only during the 90 minute period I referenced. It's most likely that there is some other issue with how you're requesting the cert. Folks can help debug at: https://community.letsencrypt.org/
I wish you good luck in court trying to get compensation for the damage you've got through a JS injection attack. Because people prefer to lock their valuables instead of constantly having to identify and sue thieves.
Not court, regulation. Wanna be a carrier? Then don't meddle with traffic. Otherwise, you are liable for all the child porn and drug trade that happen to cross your boundary.
Right, we actually agree on this. And where is regulation enforced? In courts. Who says the provider is liable? A court. This was my point: not locking your house means a lot of processing to get back to the place where you have been before - if it can ever happen. And I'd very much not go through a whole trial...
Why are you trying? Doesn’t Caddy (or something) just takes care of this well in advance and should have no issues with one or several days of my service at all at any time?
Edit: my bad. I’ve tried as well recently, when you’re rushing to get your new domain up of course…
No, it's not. You can always switch to a different SSL provider. There are other free ones (as mentioned in other comments).
However, thinking about how to make your own setup more robust without having to manually change configuration when one SSL provider stops working is a good exercise. I wonder if you can just get your server's private key signed by multiple SSL providers, and serve multiple certificates to clients, and whether all browsers handle that correctly.
Nothing is a point of failure if you can switch but that's not really true unless you have fail-over.
If LE was to go nope right now, how fast could you move your stack from LE?
You can't use multiple SSL certificates as redundancy. You could probably create something bespoke with a Load Balancer and SSL offloading but that's just more overhead for really nothing.
Just picture the massive load spikes on other SSL providers in that moment. And the fact that even those might not work, as their backends might rely on LE SSL 3rd party services for ID checking or something.
If you couldn't switch, that would be a monopoly. But single point of failure is when you put all your fruit in one basket. Airplanes have redundant systems, even though you can always buy new components. But it's much harder to change them mid-flight.
Ok, but that would just be your own website having a single point of failure, not that Let's Encrypt is a single point of failure. Otherwise you could call every certificate authority a single point of failure.
Hot take, but in general single points of failure are less of an issue than it seems because usually outages simply aren't that common. Meanwhile maintaining whole infrastructure to avoid single point of failure is often very expensive.
In theory this sounds great, but you only realize how much do you rely on a single point of failure, once it fails. Just see github outages or even electricity outages at your home.
drsalt | a day ago
hermeticlock | a day ago
saagarjha | a day ago
tonyhart7 | a day ago
RetroTechie | a day ago
xp84 | a day ago
fragmede | a day ago
notrealyme123 | a day ago
hdgvhicv | a day ago
https://garantir.io/certificate-revocation-challenges-and-be...
jzl | a day ago
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2025/08/crlite-fast-private-and-co...
zx8080 | a day ago
hdgvhicv | a day ago
Thus doesn’t really work. Sadly.
naturalmovement | a day ago
The last browser where revocation worked properly is Internet Fucking Explorer.
flakes | a day ago
Questions come up: do you block a request if you fail to download the latest CRL? How often do you refresh it?
When the cert expires, it can be removed from the CRL, so shorter lived certs will allow CRLs to be smaller and faster to transfer.
naturalmovement | a day ago
In the before times we left settings like this up to competent system administrators to decide based on risk and not hardcoded by a handful of people at Google.
dijit | a day ago
Sorry, we don't hire those anymore.
Best I can do is a YAML monkey who knows how to glue cloud services together..
icedchai | a day ago
spragl | a day ago
Dylan16807 | a day ago
If anyone is renewing certificates with less than a day remaining, that's an issue on their end far more than anything else.
Kesseki | a day ago
[OP] widdakay | a day ago
Kesseki | a day ago
saagarjha | a day ago
Kesseki | a day ago
dlcarrier | a day ago
Kesseki | a day ago
number6 | a day ago
ofrzeta | a day ago
AceJohnny2 | a day ago
AceJohnny2 | a day ago
ref: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/millions-of-websites-o...
xarope | a day ago
zelphirkalt | a day ago
gib444 | a day ago
greatgib | a day ago
> Some clients may encounter 400 and 500 error responses.
pibaker | a day ago
Requirements: free, available to everyone, automation friendly, issues certificates that are actually considered trustworthy by other parties.
evbogue | a day ago
treesknees | a day ago
Google Trust Services – free ACME certs, requires a Google account for registration
SSL.com Free DV SSL – offers free 90-day certs through ACME
polpo | a day ago
curben | a day ago
otabdeveloper4 | a day ago
None. Big tech intentionally made Let's Encrypt a single point of giant failure.
> And in case none exists, what does it take to build one?
A new Internet and Web standards stack. The whole problem is self-imposed -- we could have published self-signed Ed25519 keys on the DNS instead, and the result would be more secure than whatever it is we have now.
icedchai | a day ago
Let's Encrypt is incredible.
dlcarrier | a day ago
It's a bit mathy, but if you can make it through that, I highly recommend watching the whole video, especially if you like dad jokes.
JumpCrisscross | a day ago
It seems a bit silly that a service that could be forced by EO to revoke foreign certificates is the backbone of so much of the internet.
nubinetwork | a day ago
ardeaver | a day ago
NewJazz | a day ago
Kesseki | a day ago
dxdm | a day ago
Kesseki | a day ago
dxdm | a day ago
dlcarrier | a day ago
dlcarrier | a day ago
I wish Firefox would just give a mild warning for a recently expired certificate, instead of treating it the same as a true man-in-the-middle attach. It's not like someone who couldn't factor the private key in 200 days could in 201 days or even 300 days.
I'm convinced that we'd have better security, if we didn't have so much security theater. You'd think TLS is useless, from the warning my phone gives if I connected to a public Wi-Fi AP, but then again there's nothing in TLS (or WPA) that prevents it from being used in a way that is completely useless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1si1y5lvkk
jaas | a day ago
I don't think so. There was a dip in success rates for 90 minutes today, but nobody should be renewing their certificate within 90 minutes of expiration. If you're at that point, something went wrong weeks ago.
LtWorf | a day ago
How long do you think a certificate lives?
jaas | a day ago
If you're one of the few early adopters of short-lived (6-day) certs you should renew at 3 days, giving you 3 days for a successful renewal. A 90 minute outage, even if it was a full outage, would not interfere with a successful renewal.
nottorp | a day ago
selcuka | a day ago
Apparently certificates are becoming OCSP-only with a TTL.
bebop | a day ago
Biganon | a day ago
mannyv | a day ago
You obviously haven't worked with hardware guys.
"I mean, what's the point of those last 30 days if you need to renew it 30 days before expiration? Why not just renew it before it expires? If I'm required to renew it 30 days before the expiration date then the expiration date is a lie, isn't it?"
ozim | a day ago
NewJazz | a day ago
selcuka | a day ago
Many countries won't let you enter if your passport expires less than 6 months after your planned departure date. Basically the effective validity of a passport is 0.5 years less than the period you pay for.
dingaling | a day ago
Nope, if the SSL industry continues to insist on increasingly short cert lifetimes then I want Firefox to give no quarter when a cert expires.
Play by their rules and fall by their rules too.
MobiusHorizons | a day ago
mannyv | a day ago
The former is most likely an administrative error (ie: someone forgot to renew, or the auto-renew is failing). The latter is more likely to be an MTM attack.
I'm not sure how you would use an expired cert as an attack vector. By loading in an old cert into an expired domain so you could spoof older content?
mcpherrinm | a day ago
Expiry is a pretty fundamental part of the security model of certificates.
tgsovlerkhgsel | a day ago
Also of course domains changing owners, but again... I don't think we have good monitoring for that during the current long lifetime, so maybe a grace period where a warning is shown but it's easier to click through would be a good idea. Perhaps combined with a requirement to keep revocation information (and keep revoking expired certificates) X days past expiry.
arcfour | a day ago
fragmede | a day ago
bruce511 | a day ago
The IoT should have updated the certs weeks in advance. If they haven't done it by day 0 then their process is broken and delaying the scary warning to say day +5 won't solve anything.
tgsovlerkhgsel | a day ago
lambdaone | a day ago
That's probably long enough for most companies to be alerted to the problem in time and to get their act together to fix the problem.
hannob | a day ago
Experience and user studies have shown that users have a hard time decoding what error messages mean. "This certificate is expired, but only for a little while" isn't meaningful for people who don't have a mental model of what a certificate is.
Furthermore, "downgrading" warnings increases the incentive to ignore issues, potentially causing more problems down the line.
bluesign | a day ago
jaas | a day ago
It seems our status.io notes are being misinterpreted as much more severe than they were intended to reflect.
Edit: Note that this was written in response to a previous submission title implying that Let's Encrypt was entirely down most of the day.
[OP] widdakay | a day ago
jaas | a day ago
[OP] widdakay | a day ago
sgt | a day ago
[OP] widdakay | a day ago
jaas | a day ago
[OP] widdakay | a day ago
jaas | a day ago
[OP] widdakay | a day ago
jaas | a day ago
taspeotis | a day ago
sam_lowry_ | a day ago
cpach | a day ago
sam_lowry_ | a day ago
P.S. JS injection into TCP packets and other meddling with passthrough data should be banned legally, not technically via encryption.
soco | a day ago
sam_lowry_ | a day ago
soco | a day ago
sam_lowry_ | a day ago
Natfan | a day ago
teekert | a day ago
Edit: my bad. I’ve tried as well recently, when you’re rushing to get your new domain up of course…
po1nt | a day ago
gsliepen | a day ago
However, thinking about how to make your own setup more robust without having to manually change configuration when one SSL provider stops working is a good exercise. I wonder if you can just get your server's private key signed by multiple SSL providers, and serve multiple certificates to clients, and whether all browsers handle that correctly.
doublerabbit | a day ago
If LE was to go nope right now, how fast could you move your stack from LE?
You can't use multiple SSL certificates as redundancy. You could probably create something bespoke with a Load Balancer and SSL offloading but that's just more overhead for really nothing.
po1nt | 19 hours ago
po1nt | 20 hours ago
gsliepen | 9 hours ago
anal_reactor | a day ago
po1nt | 20 hours ago
anal_reactor | 11 hours ago
I haven't had one in 20 years, which kinda proves my point.