Hacker News Reader

> because we believe that many people don't have the expertise or inclination to do it on their own.

So they've set-up a server or VPS, installed a web server and possibly a CMS, configured virtual hosts and appropriate users, hooked-up an RDBMS but... SSL is too hard?

Don't kid yourself, most hobbyists are keen on Let's Encrypt because it's free.

People who really don't have knowledge or inclination for SSL configuration will be waiting for an option on their hosting provider's control panel. They don't have root shell access.

> It's frustrating to see the occasional conspiracy theory suggesting that the Let's Encrypt project somehow wants to backdoor the client in order to compromise people's servers

That's not the only reason someone might not want to use the LE client. Here are a few others:

1. The LE client might have a bug that causes problems on my server.

2. I may have done something non-standard to my config files that the LE client undoes.

3. Someone may have compromised the LE client or one of its dependencies without your knowledge.

I agree with those concerns, and I definitely don't mean to suggest that people who chose not to use the client all believe in conspiracy theories about the developers' intentions.

Wow, awesome to hear you chime in, and thanks for your great work on getting Let's Encrypt up and running!

Please don't take my post as a direct criticism of the official client; I think it's just a question of use cases, and my case doesn't have much overlap with the "I want a client that takes care of everything" use case.

If you can't trust a CA not to prevent their official client from becoming malware, then I don't see how you can trust them to maintain their position as CA. There is no real scenario where the official client is discovered to be backdoored, and people go on using Let's Encrypt certificates.

Malware isn't the problem - their automagic client screwing up my webserver is the problem. This is a justified concern given that the official client already demonstrates bad behavior by causing side effects on --help (see my top level post).

It is not a concern at all for me, because I can run that command from a user that does not have privileges to mess anything up. Those options make it not even attempt to read or write any web server configuration. All it does is create the certificate.

Even worse: It already has screwed up my webserver.

Script crashed while trying to verify, left the apache config files in the modified state.

Trying to get that back to work took another half hour of the server being down.

I’m gonna use the simple website someone made to generate certificates from now on.

Take a look at acme-tiny as well. You can run acme-tiny in a cronjob to update your certs, since LE certs expire in 90 days.

Doing it manually every 90 days isn’t that hard. I’d prefer if the default client would properly separate the parts it does, though.