[HN Gopher] Let's Encrypt Receives the Levchin Prize for Real-Wo...
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       Let's Encrypt Receives the Levchin Prize for Real-World
       Cryptography
        
       Author : deaddabe
       Score  : 110 points
       Date   : 2022-04-13 18:34 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (letsencrypt.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (letsencrypt.org)
        
       | bombcar wrote:
       | The main thing I'm thankful for Let's Encrypt for is breaking the
       | idea that an SSL-secured website is somehow magically _less
       | likely_ to be phishing or even anything but claiming it 's the
       | data from the domain you connected to, without changes.
       | 
       | Mainly this was propagated by EV cert sellers, but it was all
       | kinda silly.
        
         | lukeschlather wrote:
         | That idea is unfortunately alive and well. Many organizations
         | require it, much like they require 90-day password rotation and
         | other questionable security standards.
        
           | recursive wrote:
           | There are plenty of good reasons to require it. Proving a
           | trustworthy counter-party for the request is just not one of
           | them.
        
           | gunapologist99 wrote:
           | Ironic that 90 day certificate rotation makes even less sense
           | than 90 day password rotation.
        
         | tialaramex wrote:
         | Let's Encrypt's own community forums get posts every day from
         | people saying, wait, I got scammed/ phished/ whatever on this
         | site, it has your certificate, shouldn't you shut it down? They
         | do have a page to link those enquiries to, explaining the
         | policy (and indeed they even have standard _legal briefs_
         | because periodically lawyers get the same idea and a court has
         | to be told why that 's wrong).
         | 
         | It would be interesting to know if, say, US citizens write to
         | the Department of State saying hey, revoke this guy's passport,
         | I heard he ripped off somebody on Craig's List...
        
       | achillean wrote:
       | Use of Lets Encrypt has grown steadily over the years:
       | 
       | https://trends.shodan.io/search?query=ssl%3A%22Let+s+Encrypt...
       | 
       | Its use is also growing in mail servers so it's not limited to
       | HTTPS:
       | 
       | https://trends.shodan.io/search?query=ssl%3A%22Let+s+Encrypt...
        
       | nonrandomstring wrote:
       | "Let's Encrypt is currently used by more than 280 million
       | websites, issuing between two and three million certificates per
       | day. I often think about how we got here, looking for some nugget
       | of wisdom that might be useful to others."
       | 
       | I guess it's keep trying. Keep patiently explaining, educating
       | and building.
       | 
       | I remember people saying "You'll never be able to topple the
       | certs racket" - and here we are... in a age where every day I
       | read about how we'll 'never' be able to break the big-tech
       | stranglehold and build a distributed network owned by the people,
       | 'never' have privacy and real end-to-end encryption because
       | 'nobody cares', 'never' have practical p2p digital currencies of
       | our own, and where we'll never have open, verifiable hardware.
       | Keep believing.
        
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       (page generated 2022-04-13 23:01 UTC)