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?

  • umami_wasabiEnglish
    -2•7 days ago

    I didn’t say it isn’t legit nor I distrust automation, but I would like to see anyone operating an online shop paid for a cert to show they are honest and won’t diappear in thin air not delivering. Am I going to get back what I paid, properly not, but a basic DV cert isn’t expensive either for a business.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•6 days ago

      Would you accept a certificate issued by AWS (Amazon)? Or GCP (Google)? Or azure (Microsoft)? Do you visit websites behind cloudflare with CF issued certs? Because all 4 of those certificates are free. There is no identity validation for signing up for any of them really past having access to some payment form (and I don’t even think all of them do even that). And you could argue between those 4 companies it’s about 80-90% of the traffic on the internet these days.

      Paid vs free is not a reliable comparison for trust. If anything, non-automated processes where a random engineer just gets the new cert and then hopefully remembers to delete it has a number of risk factors that doesn’t exist with LE (or other ACME supporting providers).

    • Max-PEnglish
      9•7 days ago

      LetsEncrypt certs are DV certs. That a put a TXT record for LetsEncrypt vs a TXT record for a paid DigiCert makes no difference whatsoever.

      I just checked and Shopify uses a LetsEncrypt cert, so that’s a big one that uses the plebian certs.

    • Nougat
      4•7 days ago

      The difference between $0 and $50 isn’t really relevant.

      • umami_wasabiEnglish
        -4•7 days ago

        Then I don’t see any problem for them just put down $50 more.

        • Nougat
          8•7 days ago

          Bad actors can afford $50 the same as good ones.