Thank you, I missed the part with several "top of the chain" providers. So all of them would need to go down at the same time for things to really stop working.

How many "top of chain" providers is letsencrypt using? Are they a single point of failure in that regard?

I'd imagine that other "top of chain" providers want money for their certificates and that they might have a manual process which is slower than letsencrypt?

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mholt 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

LE has 2 primary production data centers: https://letsencrypt.status.io/

But in general, one of the points of ACME is to eliminate dependence on a single provider, and prevent vendor lock-in. ACME clients should ideally support multiple ACME CAs.

For example, Caddy defaults to both LE and ZeroSSL. Users can additionally configure other CAs like Google Trust Services.

This document discusses several failure modes to consider: https://github.com/https-dev/docs/blob/master/acme-ops.md#if...

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cpach 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

“Are they a single point of failure in that regard?”

It depends. If the ACME client is configured to only use Let’s Encrypt, then the answer is yes. But the client could fall-back to Google’s CA, ZeroSSL, etc. And then there is no single point of failure.

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bflesch 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Makes sense. I assume each of them is in control and at the whims of US president?

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alwillis 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Makes sense. I assume each of them is in control and at the whims of US president?

Absolutely not.

If the president attempted to force a US-based CA to do something bad they don't want to do, they would sue the government. So far, this administration loses 80% of the lawsuits brought against it.

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cpach 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It seems that currently most free CAs have a big presence in the US, and employ quite a few US employees.

ZeroSSL/HID Global seems to be quite multi-national though, and it’s owned by a Swedish company (Assa Abloy).

I don’t know what what kind of mitigations these orgs have in place if the shit really hits the fan in the US. It’s an interesting question for sure.

	▲	iso1631 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Fundamentally, Microsoft, Google and Apple are all run by American citizens living in America. Firefox is pretty much the same. The US has strong institutions which prevent the President or Government at large controlling these on a whim. If those institutions fail then they could all push out an update which removes all "top of chain" trusted certificate authorities other than ones approved by the US government. In that situation the internet is basically finished as it stands now, and the OSes would be non-trustworthy anyway. Fixing the SSL problems is the easy part, the free world would push its own root certificate out -- which people would have to manually install from a trusted source, but that's nothing compared to the real problem. Sure, Ubuntu, Suse etc aren't based in the US, but the number of phones without a US based OS is basically zero, you'd have to start from scratch with a forked version of android which likely has NSA approved backdoors in it anyway. Non-linux based machines would also need to be wiped.

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mholt 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They are not in control of the US president.

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bflesch 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm pretty sure that the .org TLD can be shut off by the US at any point in time.

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cpach 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That’s not relevant though. These CAs will gladly give you a .se/.dk/.in/whatever cert as long as validation passes.

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bflesch 8 hours ago | parent [-]

I hope so, but can we really be sure that .se or .de would still work in such a scenario? Is the TLD root management really split up vertically or is the (presumably US-based) TLD parent organization also the final authority for every country TLD?

It would be nice to at least have a very high level contingency plan because in worst case I won't be able to google it.

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cpach 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Not sure what the exact concern is here. So far, virtually all countries on Earth are still represented in DNS. Venezuela, Iran, Somalia, etc etc.

You can also read a lot of anti-Trump articles and comments on countless web-sites, some under .com and some under other top-domains. As lunatic as Trump is, he hasn’t shut that down.

“Is the TLD root management really split up vertically”

AFAIK, yes, it is.

But if the global DNS would somehow break down I guess you either have to find an alternative set of root servers. Or communicate outside of the regular Internet. Such an event surely would shock the global economy.

	▲	bflesch 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's actually a really good point. Totally missed it.

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iso1631 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Lets Encrypt do not control the US president.

You could argue that The Don in charge of the US is in control of letsencrypt

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alwillis 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> You could argue that The Don in charge of the US is in control of letsencrypt

He's not in control of letsencrypt or any other US-based CA.

It may not be well known, but Trump's administration loses about 80% of the time when they've been sued by companies, cities and states.

There's much more risk of state-sponsored cyber attacks against US companies.

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bflesch 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, it's a bit far fetched but after Cloudflare CEO basically threatening to cut off Italy I was wondering what would happen if US really invades Greenland.

A simple windows to linux migration is not enough. If certificates expire without a way to refresh you'd either need to manually touch every machine to swap root certificates or have some of other contingency plan.

	▲	cpach 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Remember that there are lots of CAs, and quite many of them are based outside of the US. Those CAs currently do not offer ACME services for free, but there’s nothing stopping them from doing so. I would say that the WebPKI system seems to be quite resilient, even in the face of strong geopolitical tension.