This letter was originally published in our 2024 Annual Report.
The past year at ISRG has been a great one and I couldn’t be more proud of our staff, community, funders, and other partners that made it happen. Let’s Encrypt continues to thrive, serving more websites around the world than ever before with excellent security and stability. Our understanding of what it will take to make more privacy-preserving metrics more mainstream via our Divvi Up project is evolving in important ways.
You can make your own cert. To make sure your cert belongs to you (your site) it is signed by authority and the client then may verify that authority (which cetificate is preinstalled in their system) in fact had verified ownership of your site and then signed your cert claims with their private key.
Certificates are to protect against MitM attacks, not prevent your site from getting hacked. You need to secure everything, this is one aspect of it
So why can’t I make my own cert? Give the caller my public key and on we go.
You can make your own cert. To make sure your cert belongs to you (your site) it is signed by authority and the client then may verify that authority (which cetificate is preinstalled in their system) in fact had verified ownership of your site and then signed your cert claims with their private key.