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6-Day and IP Address Certificates Are Generally Available
- gruez 8mo agoFor people who want IP certificates, keep in mind that certbot doesn't support it yet, with a PR still open to implement it: https://github.com/certbot/certbot/pull/10495 https://github.com/certbot/certbot/pull/10495 I think acme.sh supports it though.
- mcpherrinm 8mo agoSome ACME clients that I think currently support IP addresses are acme.sh, lego, traefik, acmez, caddy, and cert-manager. Certbot support should hopefully land pretty soon.
- sgtcodfish 8mo agocert-manager maintainter chiming in to say that yes, cert-manager should support IP address certs - if anyone finds any bugs, we'd love to hear from you! We also support ACME profiles (required for short lived certs) as of v1.18 which is our oldest currently supported[1] version. We've got some basic docs[2] available. Profiles are set on a per-issuer basis, so it's easy to have two separate ACME issuers, one issuing longer lived certs and one issuing shorter, allowing for a gradual migration to shorter certs. [1]: https://cert-manager.io/docs/releases/ https://cert-manager.io/docs/releases/ [2]: https://cert-manager.io/docs/configuration/acme/#acme-certificate-profiles https://cert-manager.io/docs/configuration/acme/#acme-certif...
- ivanr 8mo agoAs already noted on this thread, you can't use certbot today to get an IP address certificate. You can use lego [1], but figuring out the exact command line took me some effort yesterday. Here's what worked for me: lego --domains 206.189.27.68 --accept-tos --http --disable-cn run --profile shortlived [1] https://go-acme.github.io/lego/ https://go-acme.github.io/lego/
- Svoka 8mo agoI wonder if the support made it to Caddy yet (seems to be WIP https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/7399 https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/7399)
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- btown 8mo agoWork for this in Certbot is ongoing here, with some initial work already merged, but much to go. https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues/10346 https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues/10346 https://github.com/certbot/certbot/pull/10370 https://github.com/certbot/certbot/pull/10370 showed that a proof of concept is viable with relatively few changes, though it was vibe coded and abandoned (but at least the submitter did so in good faith and collaboratively) :/ Change management and backwards compatibility seem to be the main considerations at the moment.
- certchecksh 8mo agoThank you for posting the lego command! It allowed me to quickly obtain a couple of IP certificates to test with. I updated my simple TLS certificate checker (https://certcheck.sh https://certcheck.sh) to support checking IP certificates (IPv4 only for now).
- AI-love 8mo ago[dead]
- iamrobertismo 8mo agoThis is interesting, I am guessing the use case for ip address certs is so your ephemeral services can do TLS communication, but now you don't need to depend on provisioning a record on the name server as well for something that you might be start hundreds or thousands of, that will only last for like an hour or day.
- iamrobertismo 8mo agoYeah actually seems pretty useful to not rely on the name server for something that isn't human facing.
- axus 8mo agoNo dependency on a registrar sounds nice. More anonymous.
- organsnyder 8mo agoIP addresses also are assigned by registrars (ARIN in the US and Canada, for instance).
- buckle8017 8mo agoArguably neither is particularly secure, but you must have an IP so only needing to trust one of them seems better.
- traceroute66 8mo ago> IP addresses also are assigned by registrars (ARIN in the US and Canada, for instance). To be pedantic for a moment, ARIN etc. are registries. The registrar is your ISP, cloud provider etc. You can get a PI (Provider Independent) allocation for yourself, usually with the assistance of a sponsoring registrar. Which is a nice compromise way of cutting out the middleman without becoming a registrar yourself.
- immibis 8mo ago
- zamadatix 8mo agoDoes anyone know when Caddy plans on supporting this?
- meling 8mo agoIf I can use my DHCP assigned IP, will this allow me to drop having to use self-signed certificates for localhost development?
- michaelt 8mo agoNo, they will only give out certificates if you can prove ownership of the IP, which means it being publicly routable.
- inetknght 8mo agoA lot of publicly routable IP addresses are assigned by DHCP...
- wongarsu 8mo agoFinally a reason to adopt IPv6 for your local development
- greyface- 8mo agoYes, please publish the location of your dev servers in Cert Transparency logs for everyone to see.
- toast0 8mo agoIt's just control isn't it, not ownership? I can't prove ownership of the IPs assigned to me, but I can prove control.
- einsteinx2 8mo agoYes that’s correct
- meling 8mo agoSorry, I wasn’t precise enough. I’m at a university and our IP addresses are publicly routable, I think.
- hojofpodge 8mo agoSomething about a 6 day long IP address based token brings me back to the question of why we are wasting so much time on utterly wrong TOFU authorization? If you are supposed to have an establishable identity I think there is DNSSEC back to the registrar for a name and (I'm not quite sure what?) back to the AS.for the IP.
- ycombinatrix 8mo agoDomains map one-to-one with registrars, but multiple AS can be using the same IP address.
- hojofpodge 8mo agoThen it would be a grave error to issue an IP cert without active insight into BGP. (Or it doesn't matter which chain you have.. But calling a website from a sampling of locations can't be a more correct answer.)
- ycombinatrix 8mo ago>it would be a grave error to issue an IP cert without active insight into BGP Why? Even regular certs are handed out via IP address.
- hojofpodge 8mo ago> why we are wasting so much time on utterly wrong TOFU authorization? If you are supposed to have an establishable identity I think there is DNSSEC back to the registrar They retire challenges that were once acceptable. What happens if they require a real chain of trust? They retire http and domain names keep working on DNS/DNSSEC. Making IP with only http challenges is going backwards.
- bflesch 8mo agoThis sounds like a very good thing, like a lot of stuff coming from letsencrypt. But what risks are attached with such a short refresh? Is there someone at the top of the certificate chain who can refuse to give out further certificates within the blink of an eye? If yes, would this mean that within 6 days all affected certificates would expire, like a very big Denial of Service attack? And after 6 days everybody goes back to using HTTP? Maybe someone with more knowledge about certificate chains can explain it to me.
- iso1631 8mo agoWith a 6 day lifetime you'd typically renew after 3 days. If Lets Encrypt is down or refuses to issue then you'd have to choose a different provider. Your browser trusts many different "top of the chain" providers. With a 30 day cert with renewal 10-15 days in advance that gives you breathing room Personally I think 3 days is far too short unless you have your automation pulling from two different suppliers.
- bflesch 8mo agoThank you, I missed the part with several "top of the chain" providers. So all of them would need to go down at the same time for things to really stop working. How many "top of chain" providers is letsencrypt using? Are they a single point of failure in that regard? I'd imagine that other "top of chain" providers want money for their certificates and that they might have a manual process which is slower than letsencrypt?
- cpach 8mo ago“Are they a single point of failure in that regard?” It depends. If the ACME client is configured to only use Let’s Encrypt, then the answer is yes. But the client could fall-back to Google’s CA, ZeroSSL, etc. And then there is no single point of failure.
- bflesch 8mo agoMakes sense. I assume each of them is in control and at the whims of US president?
- qwertox 8mo agoI have now implemented a 2 week renewal interval to test the change to the 45 days, and now they come with a 6-day certificate? This is no criticism, I like what they do, but how am I supposed to do renewals? If something goes wrong, like the pipeline triggering certbot goes wrong, I won't have time to fix this. So I'd be at a two day renewal with a 4 day "debugging" window. I'm certain there are some who need this, but it's not me. Also the rationale is a bit odd: > IP address certificates must be short-lived certificates, a decision we made because IP addresses are more transient than domain names, so validating more frequently is important. Are IP addresses more transient than a domain within a 45 day window? The static IPs you get when you rent a vps, they're not transient.
- bigstrat2003 8mo agoThe push for shorter and shorter cert lifetimes is a really poor idea, and indicates that the people working on these initiatives have no idea how things are done in the wider world.
- Sohcahtoa82 8mo agoIt's really security theater, too. Though if I may put on my tinfoil hat for a moment, I wonder if current algorithms for certificate signing have been broken by some government agency or hacker group and now they're able to generate valid certificates. But I guess if that were true, then shorter cert lives wouldn't save you.
- wang_li 8mo agoMy browser on my work laptop has 219 root certificates trusted. Some of those may be installed from my employer, but I suspect most of them come from MS as it's Edge on Windows 11. I see in that list things like "Swedish Government Root Authority" "Thailand National Root Certification Authority" "Staat der Nederlanden Root CA" and things like "MULTICERT Root Certification Authority" "ACCVRAUZ1". I don't think there is any reason to believe any certificate. If a government wants a cert for a given DNS they will get it, either because they directly control a trusted root CA, or because they will present a warrant to a company that wants to do business in their jurisdiction and said company will issue the cert. TLS certs should be treated much more akin to SSH host keys in the known hosts file. Browsers should record the cert the first time they see it and then warn me if it changes before it's expiration date, or some time near the expiration date.
- charcircuit 8mo agoNext, I hope they focus on issuing certificates for .onion addresses. On the modern web many features and protocols are locked behind HTTPS. The owner of a .onion has a key pair for it, so proving ownership is more trustworthy than even DNS.
- londons_explore 8mo agoBut isn't it unnecessary to use https, since tor itself encrypts and verifies the identity of the endpoint?
- rnhmjoj 8mo agoYes, but browsers moan if you connect to a website without https, no matter if it's on localhost or an onion service.
- charcircuit 8mo agoFor example HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 require HTTPS. While technically HTTPS is redundant, .onion sites should avoid requiring browsers to add special casing for them due to their low popularity compared to regular web sites.
- tucnak 8mo agoWhat are benefits of HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 for Tor hidden service traffic?
- xg15 8mo agoIP addresses must be accessible from the internet, so still no way to support TLS for LAN devices without manual setup or angering security researchers.
- progbits 8mo agoI mean if it's not routable how do you want to prove ownership in a way nobody else can? Just make a domain name.
- alibarber 8mo agoAlso I don't see the point of what TLS is supposed to solve here? If you and I (and everyone else) can legitimately get a certificate for 10.0.0.1, then what are you proving exactly over using a self-signed cert? There would be no way of determining that I can connecting to my-organisation's 10.0.0.1 and not bad-org's 10.0.0.1.
- londons_explore 8mo agoPerhaps by providing some identifier in the URL? ie. https://10.0.0.1(af81afa8394fd7aa)/index.htm https://10.0.0.1(af81afa8394fd7aa)/index.htm The identifier would be generated by the certificate authority upon your first request for a certificate, and every time you renew you get to keep the same one.
- alibarber 8mo agoI see what you're getting at - but to me this sounds almost exactly like just using DNS, even if the (A/AAAA) record you want to use resolves to an un-routable address: https://letsencrypt.org/docs/challenge-types/#dns-01-challenge https://letsencrypt.org/docs/challenge-types/#dns-01-challen... - you just create a DNS TXT record instead of them trying to access a server at the address for verification.
- cpach 8mo agoA public CA won’t give you a cert for 10.0.0.1
- cedws 8mo agoI guess IP certs won't really be used for anything important, but isn't there a bigger risk due to BGP hijacking?
- toast0 8mo agoNo additional risk IMHO. If you can hijack my service IPs, you can establish control over the IPs or the domain names that point to them. (If you can hijack my DNS IPs, you can often do much more... even with DNSSEC, you can keep serving the records that lead to IPs you hijacked)
- razakel 8mo agoHas anyone actually given a good explanation as to why TLS Client Auth is being removed?
- cryptonector 8mo agoOne reason is that the client certificate with id-kp-clientAuth EKU and a dNSName SAN doesn't actually authenticate the client's FQDN. To do that you'd have to do something of a return routability check at the app layer where the server connects to the client by resolving its FQDN to check that it's the same client as on the other connection. I'm not sure how seriously to take that complaint, but it's something.
- dextercd 8mo agoIt's a requirement from the Chrome root program. This page is probably the best resource on why they want this: https://googlechrome.github.io/chromerootprogram/moving-forward-together/#phase-out-multi-purpose-roots-from-the-chrome-root-store https://googlechrome.github.io/chromerootprogram/moving-forw...
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- 0xbadcafebee 8mo agoI get why Chrome doesn't want it (it doesn't serve Chrome's interests), but that doesn't explain why Let's Encrypt had to remove it. The reason seems to be "you can't be a Chrome CA and not do exactly what Chrome wants, which is... only things Chrome wants to do". In other words, CAs have been entirely captured by Chrome. They're Chrome Authorities. Am I the only person that thinks this is insane? All web security is now at the whims of Google?
- dextercd 8mo agoAll major root store programs (Chrome, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla) have this power. They set the requirements that CAs must follow to be included in their root store, and for most CAs their certs would be useless if they aren't included in all major ones. I don't think the root programs take these kind of decisions lightly and I don't see any selfish motives they could have. They need to find a balance between not overcomplicating things for site operators and CAs (they must stay reliable) while also keeping end users secure. A lot of CAs and site operators would love if nothing ever changed: don't disallow insecure signature/hash algorithms, 5+ year valid certs, renewals done manually, no CT, no MPIC, etc. So someone else needs to push for these improvements. The changes the root programs push for aren't unreasonable, so I'm not really concerned about the power they have over CAs. That doesn't mean the changes aren't painful in the short term. For example, the move to 45 day certificates is going to cause some downtime, but of course the root programs/browsers don't benefit from that. They're still doing this because they believe that in the long term it's going to make WebPKI more robust. There's also the CA/Browser Forum where rule changes are discussed and voted on. I'm not sure how root programs decide on what to make part of their root policy vs. what to try to get voted into the baseline requirements. Perhaps in this case Chrome felt that too many CAs would vote against for self-interested reasons, but that's speculation.
- cryptonector 8mo agoHow are IP address certificates useful?
- SahAssar 8mo ago* DoT/DoH * An outer SNI name when doing ECH perhaps * Being able to host secure http/mail/etc without being beholden to a domain registrar
- cryptonector 8mo agoOh nice! I hadn't considered DoT/DoH. The ECH angle is interesting. Thanks.
- miladyincontrol 8mo agoIP addresses arent valid for the SNI used with ECH, even with TLS. On paper I do agree though it would be a decent option should things one day change there.
- tialaramex 8mo agoI think that would have been an alternate present rather than a plausible future. ECH needs for the outer (unencrypted) SNI to be somewhat plausible as a destination. For ECH GREASE what happens is that this outer SNI was real, what looks like the encrypted inner ECH data is just random noise. For non-GREASE ECH we want to look as much like the GREASE as we can, except that it's not noise that's the encrypted payload with a real inner SNI among other things.
- 12_throw_away 8mo agoTo save others a trip to Kagi: DoT / DoH = DNS over TLS [1] / https [2] E.g.: [1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/encryption/dns-over-tls/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/encryption/dns-ove... [2] https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/encryption/dns-over-https/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/encryption/dns-ove...
- cryptonector 8mo agoI wonder if transport mode IPsec can be relevant again if we're going to have IP address certificates. Ditto RFC 5660 (which -full disclosure- I authored).
- PunchyHamster 8mo agoIPSec is terrible, huge, and messy standard that company that made it took 20 years to stop getting CVE every year
- cryptonector 8mo agoBut the very nice thing about ESP (over UDP or not) is that it's much simpler to build HW offload than for TLS. Using the long ago past as FUD here is not useful.
- TwoNineFive 8mo ago> IPSec is terrible, huge, and messy standard that company that made it took 20 years to stop getting CVE every year This is fact, not FUD. Microsoft has had multiple RCE vulns in their ipsec stack in the last two years. The big vendors like Cisco had ipsec vulns for decades. These days the issues are pretty well known and documented, but it really is a bad standard.
- reincarnate0x14 8mo agoMaybe but probably not. Various always-on , SDN, or wide scale site-to-site VPN schemes are deployed widely enough for long enough now that it's expected infrastructure at this point. Even getting people to use certificates on IPSEC tunnels is a pain. Which reminds me, I think the smallest models of either Palo Alto or Checkpoint still have bizarre authentication failures if the certificate chain is too long, which was always weird to me because the control planes had way more memory than necessary for well over a decade.
- cryptonector 8mo ago
- notepad0x90 8mo agoIt's a huge ask, but i'm hoping they'll implement code-signing certs some day, even if they charge for it. It would be nice if appstores then accepted those certs instead of directly requiring developer verification.
- duskwuff 8mo ago1) For better or worse, code signing certificates are expected to come with some degree of organizational verification. No one would trust a domain-validated code signing cert, especially not one which was issued with no human involvement. 2) App stores review apps because they want to verify functionality and compliance with rules, not just as a box-checking exercise. A code signing cert provides no assurances in that regard.
- notepad0x90 8mo agoThey can just do id verification instead of domain, either in-house or outsource it. app store review isn't what I was talking about, I meant not having to verify your identity with the appstore, and use your own signing cert which can be used between platforms. Moreover, it would be less costly to develop signed windows apps. It costs several hundred dollars today.
- briHass 8mo agoAzure has a service ('Artifact Signing') which is $10/month for signing Windows executables (not Windows Store apps, which don't need it.) That's pretty reasonable, considering it is built in to all the major code signing tools on Windows, they perform the identity verification, and the private keys are fully managed by Azure. Code signing certs are required to be on HSMs, so you're most likely going to be paying some cloud CA anyway.
- notepad0x90 8mo agoThis is wild, thank you so much!! I was struggling with these costs for a long time!! Why is this not more well known? I researched this a lot and it was going to cost me at minimum $500~ over 3 years with the cheapest providers. Let me see if my specific use case can work with them. I owe you one @briHass :)
- rsync 8mo agoIP address certificates are particularly interesting for iOS users who want to run their own DoH servers. A properly configured DoH server (perhaps running unbound) with a properly constructed configuration profile which included a DoH FQDN with a proper certificate would not work in iOS. The reason, it turns out, is that iOS insisted that both the FQDN and the IP have proper certificates. This is why the configuration profiles from big organizations like dns4eu and nextdns would work properly when, for instance, installed on an iphone ... but your own personal DoH server (and profile) would not.
- fuomag9 8mo agoI use DoH behind a reverse proxy with my own domain daily without any kind of issue
- hypeatei 8mo agoOpenSSL is quite particular about the IP address being included in the SAN field of the cert when making a TLS connection, fwiw. iOS engineers may not have explicitly added this requirement and it might just be a side effect of using a crypto library.
- midtake 8mo agoWhy 6 day and not 8? - 8 is a lucky number and a power of 2 - 8 lets me refresh weekly and have a fixed day of the week to check whether there was some API 429 timeout - 6 is the value of every digit in the number of the beast - I just don't like 6!
- bayindirh 8mo agoBecause it allows to you to work for six days, and rest on the seventh. Like God did.
- batisteo 8mo agoI don't think He worked after the 6th day. Went on doing other pet projects
- ithkuil 8mo ago6 days to write a prompt. One day to unleash the agents in yolo mode
- kibwen 8mo ago² By the seventh day God had finished the work He had been doing; so on the seventh day He rested from all His work. ³ Then the on-call tech, Lucifer, the Son of Dawn, was awoken at midnight because God did not renew the heavens' and the earths' HTTPS certificate. ⁴ Thusly Lucifer drafted his resignation in a great fury.
- encrypted_bird 8mo agoI just got home from a stressful day in retail (oh who am I kidding; every day is stress in retail) and this gave me a chuckle I really needed. Thank you.
- JoBrad 8mo agoIs this the TLS version of the Bible?
- 6thbit 8mo agoThis comment used to say that was in staging only. (Nevermind, i was confused following the links from original article)
- iancarroll 8mo agoThat is a very old article that seems to be outdated now.
- rubatuga 8mo agoHonestly not a big fan of IP address certs in the context of dynamic IP address generation
- MORPHOICES 8mo ago[dead]
- apitman 8mo agoVery excited about this. IP certs solve an annoying bootstrapping problem for selfhosted/indiehosted software, where the software provides a dashboard for you to configure your domain, but you can't securely access the dashboard until you have a cert. As a concrete example, I'll probably be able to turn off bootstrap domains for TakingNames[0]. [0]: https://takingnames.io/blog/instant-subdomains https://takingnames.io/blog/instant-subdomains
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- josephernest 8mo agoDo I understand correctly: would someone have a concrete example of URL which is both an IP address and HTTPS, widely accessible from global internet? e.g. https://<ipv4-address>/ ?
- elpasi 8mo agoThe websites for DNS servers known by IP? https://1.1.1.1/ https://1.1.1.1/ presents a valid cert although it redirects.
- josephernest 8mo agoOut of curiosity, any other example without redirect, in which the URL stays https://<ip> in the browser?
- nkmnz 8mo agoWhat is a good use case for an IP address certificate for the average company? Say, e-commerce or SaaS-startup?
- superkuh 8mo agoThe Internet is for End Users https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8890 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8890 >Successful specifications will provide some benefit to all the relevant parties because standards do not represent a zero-sum game. However, there are sometimes situations where there is a conflict between the needs of two (or more) parties. >In these situations, when one of those parties is an "end user" of the Internet -- for example, a person using a web browser, mail client, or another agent that connects to the Internet -- the Internet Architecture Board argues that the IETF should favor their interests over those of other parties. Incorporated entities are just secondary users.
- nkmnz 8mo agoCan you elaborate on the context of your answer, please? I cannot connect it to anything the original post or I did write.
- AI-love 8mo ago[dead]
- Already__Taken 8mo agoI'm confused what you'd want an IP certificate for when DNS A records update so easily and cheap? Is this a case of you'd want both not either, like setting up spf/dkms/dmarc?
- greatgib 8mo ago"forced" short lived certificates sucks so much. Now you will have an American entity be controlling all your assets that you want online on a very regular basis. No way than calling home regularly. Impossible to manage your own local certificate authority as sub CA without a nightmarish constant process of renewal and distribution. For security this means that everything will be expected to have almost constant external traffic, RW servers to overwrite the certificates, keys spreaded for that... And maybe I miss something but would IP address certificate be a nightmare in term of security? Like when using mobile network or common networks like university networks, it might be very easy to snap certificates for ip shared by multiple unrelated entities. No?
- Khalequzzaman 8mo agothank you.