Free SSL certificate for pretty much anyone: https://startssl.com/
Why do people pay for SSL certificates
Why do people pay for SSL certificates
Their $25 fee for revocation during the Heartbleed situation left many of their users who could not pay their fee vulnerable to attack. During these extenuating circumstances you would expect them to offer the revocation for a discounted price or even free, but they did not. I did not have any certificates registered with them and am very glad I didn't.
I imagine that there are a huge amount of StartSSL users who cannot pay the $25 per certificate and have no choice but to leave their server vulnerable. This was pure short-sighted greed on the part of StartSSL.
I'd strongly recommend https://www.namecheap.com/security/ssl-certificates/comodo.a... It's a great price and their support has been excellent in my experience. If you have an open source project then the GlobalSign free certificate is hard to beat.
That is a terrible reason to recommend against SSL.
If you obtain a free certificate then $25 per certificate probably is an issue, especially since there is no guarantee that this won't happen again in the near future.
Many people probably have several subdomains which needed certificates, $25 per subdomain can add up quickly if you have several.
No, they were not obligated to offer revocation for free, but a significantly discounted price would have allowed a much larger percentage of people to revoke their certificates. It's not too much different than extortion, since many people who obtain free certificates are not aware of the possibility of the need to revoke a certificate, then they are basically screwed when they are forced to either pay up or have their server left insecure.
Hypothetical Situation: If I start a free SSL cert service and put in my terms that there is a $1,000 revocation fee, would that be acceptable? Many people would signup without thinking they would never need to revoke a certificate, then another Heartbleed-like situation occurs and many of your users have servers that are at risk without revocation, would it be acceptable to say, "Oh well, pay up or else someone could hack your servers".
StartSSL exploited their customers during a time of crisis (yes, servers leaking private information is a crisis) and they deserve the negative PR they are receiving from it.
Many people have even been proposing that StartSSL be removed from the trusted CA lists included with OSs and browsers since so many StartSSL certificates will remain unrevoked, and there is a valid point to that.
This would allow for a MITM attack which would obtain user credentials and unauthorized access to a server.
Since the attack isn't recorded it's unknown if it was used extensively before it was made public. The time between announcement and patching was likely significant enough for the potential of someone stealing the private key during that period as well.
This is also why re-using the same private key for the new certificate is a bad idea.
Think about the wide variety of sites that would use a free SSL certificate that might not have the funds for revocation. Almost every site I've ever seen has had people try to hack it.
There is a fairly decent chance that a very small site would not have someone steal it's private key, but it's hard to make that assumption, that's why every site about Heartbleed suggests revocation of the old certificates.
1. Attacker steals the private key via heartbleed or other means
2. Attacker sets up their own server using the stolen private key
3. Attacker tricks a user into accessing their server rather than the real server via any of a number of methods, such as a compromised hotspot.
4. User provides their sensitive information to the attacker, thinking they're on the real site.
No server-side action can mitigate the risk of a stolen private key in the above scenario, since the user never communicates with the legitimate server. That said, most browsers ship with certificate revocation lists disabled by default, so revoking the certificate doesn't help nearly as many people as we'd like. But for people who do enable CRLs, they'll see the scary warning rather than their browser trusting the revoked cert.
I grudgingly paid the revocation fees, and now they've lost my business now forever, as they essentially held the security of my domains to ransom for a quick buck.
They offer unlimited free certificates, so, naturally, I've issued one per service (they even encourage that with "web server"/"xmpp server" certificate distinction). I.e., a separate one for mail server, a separate one for HTTP server, a separate one for XMPP server and so on. Naturally, I expected that it's more likely for one service to break (i.e., say, for nginx to have some buffer overflow that'd allow extracting the keys) than all of them, like it was the case with Heartbleed.
That means, revocation would cost me not $25, but $600. Can't afford that.
Luckily, the most sensitive information I protect are my own emails, 99% of which are spam and service notifications.
StartCom is appealing as they'll issue as many certificates as you want for a one-off fee.
so I had protected my service against parts of it being compromised, but then I was screwed over completely by heartbleed.
50 certs? that'll be $1250
I'm using StartSSL verified, it costed me 99$ (personal verification) plus 99$ (company certification), and I can create any certificate I want, at any time, valid for two years and wildcard included.
Since my company provides custom subdomains for clients, and every client can have multiple subdomains on his own subdomain, we can't afford the price for every client. (I know we should charge them, but this issue is out of my hand).
The 25$ revocation fee sucks, yeah.. but StartSSL has his advantages too.
(edit: typo.)
Sometimes you do say users, but other times you say customers.
Converting users into paying customers is very important, and forcing a fee during an emergency is not a recommended way to obtain loyal customers.
You pay as soon as a human being's work (or other substantial effort) is necessary.
With regard to revocation, I do not understand the complaints since the deal with StartSSL was pretty clear and revocation does not work in practice anyway. That does, however, NOT mean that a server has to remain vulnerable, just get another certificate …
You must use Class 2 or higher for commercial.
They used to be cool, but recently they have become a major hassle to the point where it's faster and easier to just pay per certificate at more conventional CAs like those reselling instantssl. If your time has an hourly price, you'll probably even save money.
Edit: I'm sure it's a noble goal that they do not want to certify domains they cannot prove are owned by the customer, but it doesn't really do much good in practice when the CA next door will happily issue a certificate as long as you can read administrative email for the domain.