Happy birthday to Let's Encrypt !
Huge thanks to everyone involved in making HTTPS available to everyone for free !
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
974 points (99.6% liked)
Technology
60052 readers
2924 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Oh man, I forgot about startssl until just now. I definitely had a few of those certs. If you wanted something fancy like a wildcard cert back then, you were paying $$$
Luckily, wildcard certs are insecure and should be avoided.
Wildcard certs are perfectly fine. Your own instance lemm.ee is using one right now.
Obviously there could be issues if subdomains are shared with other sites, but if the whole domain is owned by 1 person, what does it matter?
If one system is somehow compromised, the attacker could effectively impersonate all the systems on your entire domain if they had the wildcard cert. Maybe it's not a huge deal for individuals but for companies or other organisations it could be extremely dangerous.
If someone wanted a wildcard cert at work I would be very cautious before I even considered issuing one. Unfortunately there are a few wildcard certs on our domain, but those are from before my time.
Having a certificate for any subdomain has implications for other sibling domains, even without a wildcard certificate.
By default, web browsers are a lot less strict about Same Origin Policy for sibling domains, which enables a lot of web-based attacks (like CSRF and cookie stealing) if your able to hijack any subdomain