| ▲ | Many Let's Encrypt renewals had errors today(letsencrypt.status.io) |
| 117 points by widdakay 2 hours ago | 67 comments |
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| ▲ | jaas an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | widdakay an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | jaas an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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/ | | |
| ▲ | widdakay an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I ran the exact same command now and it's working, so it is possible I was unlucky and was hitting all the worst possible cases. | |
| ▲ | sgt an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Could it be that he was simply throttled while retrying? That seems plausible, and it would make it seem like a long outage. | |
| ▲ | widdakay an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I updated the post title to say (Fixed) now. | | |
| ▲ | jaas an hour ago | parent [-] | | Since Let's Encrypt wasn't down most of the day if would be helpful if you could update the title to reflect that. | | |
| ▲ | widdakay 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I updated the title. Let me know if you think it's more accurate. It did appear as down for me though. | | |
| ▲ | jaas 42 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, thanks | | |
| ▲ | widdakay 32 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I did not intend this to hit the top of the front page lol. I just posted it and then came back 15 minutes later to it having exploded. | | |
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| ▲ | teekert 25 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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… |
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| ▲ | dlcarrier 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | jaas an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | mannyv an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | "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?" | | |
| ▲ | ozim 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | If they make 7 days grace period then expiration date will be a lie and of course every one will use grace period like it would be normal thing ;) |
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| ▲ | LtWorf an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > weeks ago How long do you think a certificate lives? | | |
| ▲ | jaas an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | bebop an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | Biganon 42 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | They work at letsencrypt, I'm pretty sure they know. |
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| ▲ | dingaling an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I wish Firefox would just give a mild warning for a recently expired certificate 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. | | |
| ▲ | mannyv an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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? | | |
| ▲ | tgsovlerkhgsel 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | mcpherrinm 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | If a key is breached, the certificate can be revoked, but that revocation goes away once the certificate is expired. Expiry is a pretty fundamental part of the security model of certificates. |
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| ▲ | MobiusHorizons an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | How does that help? Seems like mostly the end user suffers. |
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| ▲ | bruce511 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | tgsovlerkhgsel 35 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | fragmede an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | omg new tom7! |
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| ▲ | Kesseki 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| To be clear, “Degraded Performance” means just that, not “down.” Let’s Encrypt’s issuance is mostly working fine. |
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| ▲ | saagarjha 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I see you are unfamiliar with status page-ese. “Degraded performance” is a term which means some form of “the entire datacenter is probably on fire”. | | |
| ▲ | Kesseki 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Although I only post here personally, I work for Let’s Encrypt. | | |
| ▲ | number6 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Thanks you for your work! | |
| ▲ | ofrzeta an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It would be better to say this upfront. I am not blaming you in any way but this would prevent responses such as the parent's (hopefully). | |
| ▲ | dlcarrier 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Let them know that they're having an outage. If their monitors aren't telling them so, they might need to host them off-site. | | |
| ▲ | Kesseki 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | AceJohnny2 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A common confusion; this interpretation only applies to OVH. ref: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/millions-of-websites-o... | |
| ▲ | xarope an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That would a Microsoft'ese, "Some regions are encountering issues" => "The entire world is down, but our status page is working" | |
| ▲ | AceJohnny2 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I thought it meant "electricity has ceased to be a physical phenomenon in the general vicinity of our servers" |
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| ▲ | widdakay 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I have tried many times to renew my certs and have had 0 successes throughout today. It seems to be 100% degraded to me. | | |
| ▲ | Kesseki 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That’s unexpected. Please post details on the “Help” topic of the Let’s Encrypt community forum so that folks can take a look. |
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| ▲ | gib444 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What % of requests succeeded vs failed? How many certificates were issued during the outage vs the average? That might actually clear things up |
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| ▲ | saagarjha 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Seems not ideal for an entity who seems to be pushing for shorter expiration periods all the time |
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| ▲ | xp84 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I think it’s mostly Apple and maybe Google who have the hard-ons for the shortest expiries possible. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede an hour ago | parent [-] | | To be fair, if someone managed to steal a set of keys to Gmail.com and icloud.com, I would want them to expire as short a time as possible too. | | |
| ▲ | spragl 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | notrealyme123 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think revoking them would be better in such a case. | | |
| ▲ | flakes 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | One is not really better, you want both. Certificate revocation lists are loaded out of band and depending on the client can be poorly enforced. 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. | |
| ▲ | hdgvhicv 27 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Revoking doesn’t really work. https://garantir.io/certificate-revocation-challenges-and-be... |
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| ▲ | Dylan16807 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If it goes past 24 hours, that becomes a real worry. If anyone is renewing certificates with less than a day remaining, that's an issue on their end far more than anything else. | |
| ▲ | tonyhart7 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | isn't this the other way around ??? because shorter expiration time resulting on more issuing cert and therefore make it more prone to downtime |
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| ▲ | pibaker 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What are the viable alternatives to LE? And in case none exists, what does it take to build one? Requirements: free, available to everyone, automation friendly, issues certificates that are actually considered trustworthy by other parties. |
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| ▲ | treesknees 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | ZeroSSL – free 90-day certs via ACME, also has a web UI for cert management 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 an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | dlcarrier an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This video explores a little on how certificate authorities were given their authority and a lot on how it can fail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1si1y5lvkk 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 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Have the EU or Canada pushed to launch an analog of their own? 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. | |
| ▲ | evbogue 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Like peers could sign sites? | |
| ▲ | otabdeveloper4 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > What are the viable alternatives to LE? 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. |
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| ▲ | ardeaver 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I realize this is very much not the point, but the fact that the "Active Incident" banner is green is upsetting. |
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| ▲ | Kesseki 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | dlcarrier 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Their monitors don't seem to be detecting the outage. Sometimes they run directly on the server, and aren't able to detect routing or DNS problems. | |
| ▲ | NewJazz 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | We're operating normally, but with reduced redundancy. We continue to work with our upstream ISP to identify and resolve the issue. |
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| ▲ | nubinetwork 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's a good thing that acme clients try to renew early, rather than leaving it to the last minute... |
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| ▲ | drsalt 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| thats too bad |
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| ▲ | tomalbrc 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The amount of misinformation on this site is astonishing. "Hacker News".. |
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| ▲ | bruce511 an hour ago | parent [-] | | You are getting down-voted for this, which I think is a bit unfair. (I expect I'll get the same.) Although you don't expand your thesis, as a general feeling, I agree. But, to be fair, it has always been thus, and it has been this way in every forum ever. I'm old enough to remember the irony in "I read about it on the internet so it must be true" statements, which have existed since the internet was News (NNTP) not web. In truth, any time you get a random group of people together, of different ages and backgrounds, all of whom self-describe as "smart" you're going to get a lot of chaff mixed in with the wheat. To some extent you need to simply ignore the nonsense. There's plenty of it and "correcting people who are wrong" is seldom received well. |
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| ▲ | hermeticlock 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| :( |