posted in Selfhosted
Letsencrypt is under US jurisdiction. Is there a free-er alternative?
I know that I can simply make my own private certificate authority that only I and my family trust. But is there some public provider like letsencrypt that is in a free-er part of the world than the US?
Replying to @Sibbo@sopuli.xyz
What risk are you trying to mitigate, specifically?
If it’s the CA taking over your site, control over your CA specifically doesn’t really give any advantage to an attacker (they would have to hijack traffic and provide a new certificate - nobody will notice if the certificate is from a different CA).
Note that your CA cannot decrypt the exchanges between your server and its clients.
Replying to @talkingpumpkin@lemmy.world
Are you sure they can’t decrypt? They have your certificate after all. Besides, if the Orange has a bad day, he can ban certificates export or just for a single company or individual.
Edit: First two sentences were stupid, I apologize.
Replying to @Mihies@programming.dev
The CA cannot decypt: they don’t have the secret key which only the server has. When requesting a new certificate from the CA, the server generated a secret key (aka private key) and then generated a derived public key that goes into a Certificate Signing Request (CSR). The CSR is what the CA receives, not the secret key, and then the CA returns the certificate file to the server, which has been endorsed by the CA and thus trusted by the user base.
Phrased another way, a certificate is the instrument that confirms that a purported public key can in-fact be safely used, and that no MITM attack is happening (assuming you trust the CA that signed the cert). But once you’ve confirmed the public key, the rest of the cryptography is public key cryptography, meaning the secrecy of the secret key is the whole game.
Replying to @litchralee@sh.itjust.works
Yep, you guys are right.