I’m curious what the benefits are of paying for SSL certificates vs using a free provider such as letsencrypt.

What exactly are you trusting a cert provider with and what are the security implications? What attack vectors do you open yourself up to when trusting a certificate authority with your websites’ certificates?

In what way could it benefit security and/or privacy to utilize a paid service?

And finally, which paid SSL providers are considered trustworthy?

I know Digicert is a big player, but their prices are insane. Comodo seems like a good affordable option, but is it a trustworthy company?

  • cron@feddit.orgEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    AFAIK, the only reason not to use Letsencrypt are when you are not able to automate the process to change the certificate.

    As the paid certificates are valid for 12 month, you have to change them less often than a letsencrypt certificate.

    At work, we pay something like 30-50€ for a certificate for a year. As changing certificates costs, it is more economical to buy a certificate.

    But generally, it is best to use letsencrypt when you can automate the process (e.g. with nginx).

    As for the question of trust: The process of issuing certificates is done in a way that the certificate authority never has access to your private key. You don’t trust the CA with anything (except your payment data maybe).

    • lud@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      PSA: All public certificates (private internal certificates won’t be affected) will have a lifetime of only 90 days soon. Google is planning to reduce their lifetime in 2024 but considering that they haven’t given an update on this since early this year, I doubt it will happen this year.

      But it will happen soon.

      This will be a pain in the ass for my workplace because we primarily use Digicert and manually renewing certificates every 90 days is just impossible for use. We are currently looking into a way to switch to letsencrypt or similar.