I’m curious what the benefits are of paying for SSL certificates vs using a free provider such as letsencrypt.
What exactly are you trusting a cert provider with and what are the security implications? What attack vectors do you open yourself up to when trusting a certificate authority with your websites’ certificates?
In what way could it benefit security and/or privacy to utilize a paid service?
And finally, which paid SSL providers are considered trustworthy?
I know Digicert is a big player, but their prices are insane. Comodo seems like a good affordable option, but is it a trustworthy company?
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The point of paid SSL at this stage in the game are the higher tiers of verification. Instead of just verifying that you own the domain, you can verify that you are who you say you are. These are called Extended Validation and Organizational Validation certificates. This has historically been desirable by businesses. It used to be that these higher tier certs would not only give you a lock icon in the address bar of a web browser, but also a little blurb confirming your organization is legit. Not sure if this is still the case though. You will see the extended validation when you check the sites certificate though for sure.
As far as encryption and security, there’s no difference. Also side note, the Comodo brand still technically exists but it was bought by Sectigo like 7 years ago.
The main benefits to paying for certs are
- as many said, getting more than 90 days validity for certs that are harder to rotate, or the automation hasn’t been done.
- higher rate limits for issuing and renewing certs, you can ask letsencrypt to up limits, but you can still hit them.
- you can get certs for things other than web sites, ie code signing.
The only thing that matters to most people is that they don’t get cert errors going to/using a web site, or installing software. Any CA that is in the browsers, OS and various language trust stores is the same to that effect.
The rules for inclusion in the browsers trust stores are strict (many of the Linux distros and language trust stores just use the Mozilla cert set), which is where the trust comes from.
Which CA provider you choose doesn’t change your potential attack surface. The question on attack surface seems like it might come from lacking understanding of how certs and signing work.
A cert has 2 parts public cert and private key, CAs sign your sites public cert with their private key, they never have or need your private key. Public certs can be used to verify something was signed by the private key. Public certs can be used to encrypt data such that only the private key can decrypt it.
OP’s security concern is valid. Different CAs may differ in the challenges used to verify you to be the domain owner. Using something that you could crack may lead to an attacker’s public key being certified instead.
This could for example be the case with HTTPS verification (place a file with a specific content accessible through your URL) if the website has lacking input sanitization and/or creates files with the user’s input at an unfortunate location that collides with the challenge.
This attack vector might be far-fetched, but there can certainly be differences between different signing authorities.
Certain unnamed companies coughgoogle doesn’t like to trust Let Encrypt its definitely not an abuse of an illegal monopoly they have good reasons I promise.
But the whole point behind using a signed certificate is that other people can look at you and immediately know you are who you say you are if a company doesn’t trust you it doesn’t really matter what the motivation is you might as well use a self signed certificate.
Paid certificates have the money to make sure everyone trusts them and has a reputation to maintain so are more likely to defend a legitimate complaint.
99.999% of individuals it simply doesn’t matter(although you might have to look into it if you’re using android apps) but to a company the little bit that certification costs is worth every penny.
Google is on of the biggest Lets Encrypt sponsors and where is LE not trusted?
Not the only use cases, but you’d need a different service if you need/want wildcard certs, certs that are manually installed and managed, or certs with a longer expiration.
Let’s encrypt, and any other ACME based certificate of authorities will let anyone without identity verification create a SSL cert that will work in any browser. This creates trust issues with certain clients browsing web. For example my work (50k+ employees) uses Zscaler to evaluate if a website is safe and it 100% will down-votes any site that uses let’s encrypt due to the lack of transparency. Zscaler will eventually block that website from employees if the score falls too low. Having an SSL cert that you pay for gives cyber security, firms - rightly or wrongly - an additional level of confidence that your identity has been verified.
Full disclosure: I use let’s encrypt on all my self hosted docker instances via Coolify which suits my needs. If I were to set up an ecommerce or other site that needs to guarantee trust, I would absolutely use a paid ssl cert.
Personally, I distrust any ecommerce site that uses any free cert. I see paid cert as a commitment to do honest business, as they need to have some records on the CA.
But for a blog or anythings other than ecommerce is totally fine by me.
Note: It is not about security, nor automation, but a show commitment (i.e. buying a cert), largely psycological.
Let’s Encrypt is just as secure as paid certs. They’re held to the same security standard.
