Building a certificate authority for the whole Internet

> A very welcome move because for years Cloudflare has freeloaded certs from Let's Encrypt without sponsoring Let's Encrypt finacially.

It's not freeloading to accept a gift freely given. I'm sure the people who do fund LE are happy to see the world's largest TLS terminator using LE certs to secure the web - that is and was the whole point of LE in the first place. It's being used as intended.

I don't agree that this is a positive development if a resilient worldwide PKI is desired.

1. We have seen how Cloudflare can "break the Internet" due to their position as a SPoF. Let's Encrypt also became a SPoF as their popularity grew.

2. Cloudflare's main service depends on breaking the trust model of TLS, which is to say that users must be assured that they can communicate with a server without the possibility that third parties are observing or tampering with the connection. If I direct my user agent to example.com, I expect that my TLS connection is terminated by the operators of example.com, and any contents sent and received are between me and the servers associated with example.com. Cloudflare breaks that assumption by performing TLS interception between my user agent and the server. Yes it is true that other services, such as cloud load balancers, do the same thing, but we should not accept that this creates an important opportunity for interception or tampering due to commercial interest, duress etc.

3. Furthermore Cloudflare allows operators to present a TLS certificate to clients even when the origin server does not use TLS, leading them to believe that their connection is secure even when the leg between Cloudflare and the server is not encrypted: the so-called TLS façade.

4. Cloudflare is incorporated in a jurisdiction that has been seen to behave in a hostile, or at a minimum highly arbitrary, fashion, and has been involved in pressuring infrastructure operators to do their geopolitical bidding and personal favors to the executive. Of course Let's Encrypt also has this weakness.

Are we to believe it is a good thing that a known SPoF becomes an even more critical SPoF? That an actor who subverts TLS becomes a CA? More concentration of infrastructure control in a single jurisdiction that does not respect international norms?

Cloudflare promoters will say that points 2 and 3 are always the choice of the server operator. However Cloudflare takes advantage of the fact that most server administrators actually understand very little about how TLS, or even the Internet, works. I frequently observe that the operators of critical public services on the Internet fundamentally misunderstand basic technologies such as DNS, IP, TLS and HTTP. For those people, Cloudflare gives them an easy option to "stop the DDoS", without understanding the implications of sending their traffic to a foreign actor who will perform TLS interception. And in many cases, using Cloudflare turns into a ritualistic mimicry that is performed as a preventative rite to placate the DDoS spirits.

It is also concerning to me the suggestion that CAs which are not GTS, CF and LE are somehow considered "legacy CAs" now. In what sense?

LE recently updated their policies to say explicitly that they will comply with export restrictions:

https://letsencrypt.org/documents/LE-SA-v1.7-June-04-2026-di...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48453275

Let me remind you that the implied "modern" CAs mentioned must also comply with export restrictions, but furthermore they are subject to non-public pressure dynamics from the executive which may result in arbitrary service terminations at the individual, organization or country levels. This as well as compliance requirements with CLOUD and collection programs.

I propose that the goal should be to look for a way in which we can have widespread availability of free DV certificates for everyone who needs one, independent of their nationality, from multiple geographically distributed providers in diverse jurisdictions, coupled with a sustainable economic model for CAs which are not operated by the tech behemoths.

There are actually non-behemoth CAs, besides LE, which already provide free DV certs, ACME compatible, for example:

https://www.ssl.com/products/website-security/tls-ssl/single...

Not a huge difference between buying the root cert itself and getting a cross-sign. LE started out with cross-signs from Identrust.

"On October 19, 2015, the intermediate certificates became cross-signed by IdenTrust, causing all certificates issued by Let's Encrypt to be trusted by all major browsers."

There are a whole host of controls in place to mitigate this risk. Plus such an acquisition wouldn't be easy to keep secret, so as soon as an untrusted actor acquired control over a root, the CAB would likely immediately distrust the cert.

https://cabforum.org/working-groups/server/baseline-requirem...

Google (GTS) has done the same. GTS controls GlobalSign R4. GlobalSign R4 was a root cert which was created by GlobalSign and later sold to Google.

If a bad actor starts buying up CA's, then very quickly that CA would be distrusted by Root Cert Store Operators. No different than what happened with DigiNotr and Entrust.

It is, but that‘s why I trust Honest Achmed (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959). He is a man of integrity and will not be bought!

What you are proposing sounds like DANE with TLSA and DNSSec. Great idea but most CC TLDs are still using 1024 RSA ZSKs. Right now PQ DNSSEC is very uncertain. PQ DNSSEC will likely take about 5 more years or so to standardise. And thats too late for companies like Google and Cloudlfare which want to go PQ Crypto by 2029.

Why does every criticism of CloudFlare ignore the fact that they mitigate the largest DDoSes in the world in an age where DDoS-for-hire cost only a few dollars per minute? Nobody could do that on the budget of a 1996 local ISP with one or 2 part-time IT techs.

CloudFlare was launched as a stupid-simple CDN, but DDoS mitigation and bot reduction are actually valuable features for many websites. Sure, CF isn't the only business in this space, but most of their rivals are large enough to be in the S&P500 / Russell 2000, so it's not like garage startups are competing for this business.

"Was meant to be"

This isn't a law of physics. This was a starry-eyed hope by techno-utopians and academics when the internet was still 100% funded by Uncle Sam. When the internet moved out of its parents' basement, it had to grow up and get a job to pay the bills. Some people are fine with a SquareSpace webpage instead of running their own custom Apache httpd website on bare metal in a colo like it's 2005. The cost of maintenance and cognitive load is a cost we shouldn't ignore.

It turns out that economies of scale exist. The Internet doesn't need 10,000 small CDNs and they would all be inefficient and expensive if that was the distribution. Instead, there are a few large ones that can afford to colo in many geographically dispersed data centers and who negotiated bandwidth peering contracts for advantageous pricing.

Capitalism, starting the moment TLD registrars first bid for the monopoly to charge rent. And continuing today, where I think only Cloudflare offer below or at cost domain registration, charging nothing themselves and just passing on the other mandatory fees to the rent seekers. It has had centralization at its heart since the beginning, when someone had to allocate IP addresses and everyone else had to agree (or we would have internets and not The Internet), which enabled this. I wonder if it would have turned out differently if, instead of central IP address allocation, clients had generated a UUID and it was accepted on The Internet unless consensus agreed it wasn't unique? But I don't think we knew how to do that then and technical limitations. Heck, crypto export laws would have killed it and required a central authority to prove that a UUID was you and not an imposter.

Evolution & the illusion of the separate self.

Key signing parties don’t scale.

Because some people want power, and abuse it.

You could also make the alternative argument: the internet as a truly decentralized network as imagined by nerds was never going to actually work due to its (now obvious) impact on the political economy of the world and its actors, and because fundamentally centralized economies of scale are how humans tend to organize society. So why are internet nerds on forums so narrow minded that they don't read understand this, because they don't read books? But both of these "arguments" are pointless posts designed to get head-pats, because everyone has made up their mind. Buy your DV certs from another ACME provider.

The internet was never meant to be decentralized. It was a project researched and started by centralized entities (DOD, ARPA) that wanted to maintain command and control authority for a single person (POTUS) in the event of a physical catastrophe.

It was meant to be resilient and have multipath capability to route around damage. Having command authority sourced from multiple places was never part of the goal, and, indeed, in the client/server model that has prevailed the entire time the internet has existed, nothing about the design of the internet has been explicitly created to allow for server or data redundancy or distribution.

decentralized != distributed

Indeed, on the "modern internet" (aka the last 25+ years), everyone uses NAT, which means that end to end connectivity is not needed or wanted by most users and engineers. This idea that "every host should have a public IP, and every host should be a server as well as a client" is just fantasy that has no basis in reality, either in intent, or in practice.

That only relies on the (mostly reasonable) assumption that all CAs that don't use ACME charge for the service.

That doesn't sound like much of a contradiction to me: anyone already using standard ACME tooling can change to their new CA with a trivial configuration change - provided their standard ACME tooling is well-maintained enough to include a 5-year-old protocol extension.

Who do you like to go with for certs?

They're not. You're free to run and visit websites that don't use CF, and you're free to get certs from non-CF CAs. What on Earth makes you think that they are any sort of gatekeeper of the web?

A bot owners enshittification is a site admins salvation. The toggle is trivial to turn on or off. What will site admins do I wonder?

Are you as honest as Honest Achmed? (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959)