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Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days
(letsencrypt.org)
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this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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And you still can't self certify.
It's cute the big players are so concerned with my little security of my little home server.
Or is there a bigger plan behind all this? Like pay more often, lock in to government controlled certs (already done I guess because they control DNS and you must have a "real" website name to get a free cert)?
I feel it's 50% security 50% bullshit.
Edit: thank you all I will dive down the CA certification rabbit hole now! Have worked in C++ & X509 on the client side so maybe I'll be able to figure it out.
You can absolutely run your own CA and even get your friends to trust it.
Yes you can but the practicality of doing so is very limiting. Hell I ran my own CA for my own internal use and even I found it annoying.
The entire CA ecosystem is terrible and only exists to ensure connections are encrypted at this point. There's no validation or any sort of authority to say one site is better than another.
not all phones support manually adding certs
That's a complaint about those phones not PKI in general then. Though it's surprising their enterprise support won't let you since that is (or was) a fairly common thing for businesses to do.
That's a fair point. However, on the practical side, it's sad that I would have to root my gf's phone to let her access the services we host.
I ended up using a DynDNS and Caddy for managing my cert.
But you have to manually accept this dangerous cert in the browser right?
Very interesting actually, do you have any experience about it or other pointers? I might just set one up myself for my tenfingers sharing protocol...
It's pretty simple to set up. Generate CA, keep key and other private stuff stored securely, distribute public part of CA to whoever you want and sign all the things you wish with your very own CA. There's loads of howtos and tools around to accomplish that. The tricky part is that manual work is needed to add that CA to every device you want to trust your certificates.
Thank you! This is actually precisely what I need, you IT guys are the best!
No that's the point. If you import the CA certificate on your browser, any website that uses a cert that was signed by that CA will be trusted and accessible without warning.
Technically something like DANE can allow you to present DNSSEC-backed self-signed certs and even allow multi-domain matching that removes the need for SNI and Encrypted Client Hello... but until the browsers say it is supported, it's not
At some point there was a browser extension to support DANE (and Perspectives and similar approaches against centralization) but since then, browser vendors fixed that security flaw.
Skill issue, you've always been able to self certify. You just have to know where to drop the self signed cert or the parent/root cert you use to sign stuff.
If you're running windows, it's trivial to make a self signed cert trusted. There's an entire certificate store you can access that makes it easy enough you can double click it and install it and be on your way. Haven't had a reason to figure it out on Linux, but I expect it won't be super difficult.
I already did but my browser choked on it.
So yes I should probably set up the whole CA thing.