Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

For twenty years, Certificate Authorities ran the perfect protection racket. The CAs had a beautiful monopoly. Browsers needed them to keep users safe. Websites needed them to look legitimate. Everyone paid up, nobody asked too many questions. Then the cryptography of most certificates (SHA-1) got shattered, and the browsers realized they’d been played.

You were tired of renewing all those certificates, and Certbot looked so easy. Now you have scripts thousands of lines long filled with command line incantations you have to Google every time you open it. The script is running on all the critical servers. And some of the printers. If someone looks at it the wrong way, a certificate expires.

SSL Certificates have always been a pain in the butt. From the magical OpenSSL incantations to generate a CSR to the various formats that each webserver requires. Remembering what hardware needs which certificates. Managing scheduled renewals and runbooks for which file goes where. Screw anything up and your site is “Not Secure”. And now Apple wants us to do it every 47 days. Remember when we had HTTP-only websites? Or when certificates lasted three years? Then one?