this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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Why would anyone ever use self signed certs? Buy a cheap ass domain, and use LetsEncrypt to get a free cert.
If it is for internal only, self signed is a lot easier.
Also probably no sysadmin uses it, but the Gemini protocol requires the use of a self signed cert
Hard disagree. As long as you have any machine with internet access it’s trivial, even more so if you can use DNS challenge.
You're absolutely correct. For self hosting at home I use cloudflare for DNS challenges.
Caddy is also amazing at making things even simpler.
So is using "pass" as the password to all of your sensitive systems. Still not best, or even good practice.
Are you conflating self-signed and untrusted?
Self-signed is fine if you have a trusted root deployed across your environment.
Correct. If using actual pki with a trusted root and private CA, you're just fine.
I took the statement to mean ad-hoc self-signed certs, signed by the server that they are deployed on. That works for EiT but defeats any MitM protection, etc.
Mtls across a large number of machines. I run my own CA and intermediates on hashicorp vault.
For end user services, yes LE.
At the point of running your own CA with infrastructure in place to support it, I wouldn’t really call that “self signing.”
I get that it technically is, since you’re not going through an external CA, but really it’s like calling a companies Datacenter “self hosted” because it’s on their own hardware. Technically the truth, but not what is generally meant. 😜
What's LE?
Let's encrypt
Self signed certs are more secure. You don't have to trust the whole CA chain
I didn't say anything that disagrees with this. CAs are nice and convenient. They do this by expanding the chain of trust to a lot more people, hence making them less secure.
Sure if you can't securely manage your cert, that's a problem. But that doesn't mean let's less secure