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?

  • N0x0n@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    Except for the learning process and if you want your self-signed local domains in your lan !

    https://jellyfin.homelab.domain is easier to access than IP addresses.

    • PlexSheep@infosec.pub
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      3 months ago

      In that case, i recommend step-ca, which is a certificate authority server with acme support anyone can self host. The setup took a while but it’s been running for months now without problems for me.

      • N0x0n@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        Yeaaah I already played a bit arround with step-ca ! Right now a make a mini-CA with openssl.

        When I get more comfortable with how everything works together I will surely give step-ca another try.

        • PlexSheep@infosec.pub
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          3 months ago

          I found open-ssl to be much harder to use. Do you just manually make new certificates with the CA in CLI?

    • state_electrician
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      3 months ago

      I’ve been doing home networking for many years now and the public Domain + Cloudflare DNS + Let’s Encrypt is the easiest it’s ever been.

      • N0x0n@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        Can’t argue against that.

        However, I prefer local domain names accessible via Wireguard with self-signed certs. I like to understand how everything works under the hood !

        Also, I’m broke AF and buying a domain name (even cheap ones) are out of my budget :(.

        • qaz@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Numeric .xyz domains only cost $1 a year. They’re not great for things like mail because they’re often used by spammers (probably because of the price), but it’s great for cheap signed DNS hostnames.

          I point it to the server on my local network and use Wireguard to connect myself.