WebPKI Posts

Let’s Encrypt ran their first annual mass revocation drill, shortening ARI renewal windows across 3 million production certificates. Here’s what happened.

When a CA has to revoke hundreds of thousands of certificates on a short deadline, email notifications aren’t enough. ARI is the protocol that lets the CA tell your client directly: renew now. Here’s how it works, and why most ACME clients can’t actually respond in time.

The bar closes March 15. After that, no CA can serve you a 398-day certificate. If you’re still managing commercial SSL certs manually, you have two weeks to grab one last round of full-year runway before the 200-day era begins.

A stolen TLS private key sounds catastrophic. But thanks to forward secrecy, it can’t decrypt recorded traffic. The only thing left is server impersonation, and that requires network position that ranges from “be in the same room” to “be a nation-state.” We looked at the data on how often this actually happens.

We wrote about BygoneSSL and the 1.5 million domains with certificates owned by someone else. Then we bought certkit.dev and found one on our own domain. A DigiCert certificate, still valid for 98 days, issued to whoever owned this domain before us. Here’s what we found, what we tried to do about it, and what happened when we tried to revoke it.

IT teams keep buying certificates from DigiCert and Sectigo because free feels risky. But the assumptions behind that trust are a decade old. Let’s Encrypt now secures 64% of the web, is funded by Google and AWS, and uses the same encryption as your $500 certificate. The real question isn’t whether free is good enough. It’s whether you’ve examined your objections lately.

You’ve been using wildcard certificates for years because they were simpler. One cert, one renewal, copy it everywhere. But now you’re automating anyway. If certificate management is no longer painful, do you still need wildcards? Or are they solving a problem that no longer exists?

HTTPS went from 40% to over 90% of web traffic in a decade and the ACME protocol made that possible. But ACME solved certificate issuance, not certificate operations. Getting a cert is easy now. Getting it onto all your servers is still your job.

We used to treat private keys like plutonium because losing one meant every encrypted conversation ever was compromised. Perfect Forward Secrecy fixed that. Now each connection gets temporary keys that vanish after use, so stolen certificates can’t decrypt old traffic. It makes private keys safe to touch.

In this post we’ll write Golang code to pull Certificate Transparency Log entries and process them at scale.

Searching Certificate Transparency logs lets you uncover every SSL/TLS certificate ever issued for your domain. You can detect mis-issuance, unauthorized changes, or shadow infrastructure before it becomes a problem. It’s a good way to monitor your digital identity and maintain trust in your organization’s security posture.

SSL Certificate revocation is so broken that browser vendors gave up trying to fix it. Chrome manually curates 24,000 ‘important’ revocations out of 2 million. Firefox uses bloom filters that flag valid certs as revoked. Safari does something nobody can document. The industry’s solution? Pretend 47-day certificates solve the problem.

When domains change hands, old certificates don’t. Two researchers at DEFCON found 1.5 million domains with valid certs owned by someone else. This is the security research that killed long certificates. And why 47-day certificates aren’t just browser bureaucracy. They’re fixing a problem we ignored for 20 years.

For twenty years, Certificate Authorities ran the perfect protection racket. Then SHA-1 got shattered, Apple went rogue, and certificates went from lasting 3 years to 47 days. This is the story of how browsers broke the CA cartel, and why your manual certificate process is about to become your biggest problem.