Who benefits from this? Even though Let’s Encrypt stresses that most site operators will do fine sticking with ordinary domain certificates, there are still scenarios where a numeric identifier is the only practical choice:

Infrastructure services such as DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) – where clients may pin a literal IP address for performance or censorship-evasion reasons.
IoT and home-lab devices – think network-attached storage boxes, for example, living behind static WAN addresses.
Ephemeral cloud workloads – short-lived back-end servers that spin up with public IPs faster than DNS records can propagate.
    • @[email protected]
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      419 hours ago

      Domains need to be registered annually and DNS servers are needed to route traffic to them. But using an IP directly, you don’t need to worry about domain registration issues that can brick your systems, and you don’t have to worry about DNS providers knowing about your traffic (or maintaining your own private dns).

      If it’s not a user trying in a memorable domain, an IP serves much better.

  • @[email protected]
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    1 day ago

    This could go a long way towards fighting online censorship. One less issue when an authoritarian overreach gets your domain seized. Pretty awesome.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 days ago

      Maybe I’m not understanding it but I can’t see what I would use this for due to the 6 day issue period. Bringing a NAS up to copy data for a couple days is the only real use case I find for home users.

      Because even if you pay for a static external IP from your ISP, this doesn’t support using such for longer than that period right?

      • @[email protected]
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        82 days ago

        Let’s Encrypt is meant yo be used with automated certificate renewal using the ACME protocol. There are many clients for this. Both standalone and built into e.g. Caddy, Traefik and other software that does SSL termination.

        So this specific concern doesn’t really make sense. But that doesn’t mean I really see a use case for it either, since it usually makes more sense to access resources via a host name.

        • @[email protected]
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          22 days ago

          Thanks! I’ll look into that, this could be useful for me then after all. This is why it’s always good to ask questions

  • @[email protected]
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    543 days ago

    That’s kind of awesome! I have a bunch of home lab stuff, but have been putting off buying a domain (I was a broke college student when I started my lab and half the point was avoiding recurring costs- plus I already run the DNS, as far as the WAN is concerned, I have whatever domain I want). My loose plan was to stand up a certificate authority and push the root public key out with active directory, but being able to certify things against Let’s Encrypt might make things significantly easier.

    • qaz
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      192 days ago

      FYI you can get a numeric xyz domain for 1$ a year

    • oasis
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      152 days ago

      Setting up a root and a immediate CA is significantly more fun though ;) It’s also teaches you more about PKI which is a good skill to have.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 days ago

        but for the love of god and your own benefit, put a name constraint directly on the root cert

    • fmstrat
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      82 days ago

      I use a domain, but for homelab I eventually switched to my own internal CA.

      Instead of having to do service.domain.tld it’s nice to do service.lan.

        • fmstrat
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          32 days ago

          I just use openssl"s built in management. I have scripts that set it up and generate a .lan domain, and instructions for adding it to clients. I could make a repo and writeup if you would like?

          As the other commenter pointed out, .lan is not officially sanctioned for local use, but it is not used publicly and is a common choice. However you could use whatever you want.

          • fmstrat
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            42 days ago

            No thanks. I get some people agreed to this, but I’m going to continue to use .lan, like so many others. If they ever register .lan for public use, there will be a lot of people pissed off.

            IMO, the only reason not to assign a top-level domain in the RFC is so that some company can make money on it. The authors were from Cisco and Nominum, a DNS company purchased by Akamai, but that doesnt appear to be the reason why. .home and .homenet were proposed, but this is from the mailing list:

            1. we cannot be sure that using .home is consistent with the existing (ab)use
            2. ICANN is in receipt of about a dozen applications for “.home”, and some of those applicants no doubt have deeper pockets than the IETF does should they decide to litigate

            https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/homenet/PWl6CANKKAeeMs1kgBP5YPtiCWg/

            So, corporate fear.

              • fmstrat
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                110 hours ago

                I’m not sure I follow the question. All of the TLD *.arpa is not reserved for private use, only *.home.arpa. So all your internal services are required to be a sub domain.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 days ago

      Maybe kinda, but it’s also a third party whose certificates are almost if not entirely universally trusted. Self-signed certs cause software to complain unless you also spread a root certificate to be trusted to any machine that might use one of your self-signed certs.

    • @[email protected]
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      122 days ago

      With dynamic DNS? Yeah it always has, as long as you can host a http server.

      With a dynamic IP? It should do, the certs are only valid for 6 days for that reason.

  • Björn Tantau
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    22 days ago

    I never understood why we don’t use IP certificates to encrypt the domain with SNI.

      • Zagorath
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        92 days ago

        In much simpler terms:

        Think of an IP address like a street address. 192 My Street.

        There might be multiple businesses at one street address. In real life we address them with things like 1/192 My Street and 2/192 My Street, but there’s no direct parallel to that in computer networks. Instead, what we do is more like directing your letter to say “Business A c/o 192 My Street”. That’s what SNI does.

        Because we have to write all of that on the outside of the envelope, everyone gets to see that we’re communicating with Business A. But what if one of the businesses at 192 My Street is highly sensitive and we’d rather people didn’t know we were communicating with them? @[email protected]’s proposal is basically like if you put the “Business A” part inside the envelope, so the mailman (and anyone who sees the letter on the way) only see that it’s going to 192 My Street. Then the front room at that address could open the envelope and see that the ultimate destination is Business A, and pass it along to them.

        • @[email protected]
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          52 days ago

          There’s Encrypted Client Hello, supported by major browsers that does the SNI encryption. It’s starting to be fairly widely supported.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 days ago

          192 My Street

          Except that with street addresses there is such a lack of inconsistency on how they work and are written that it is funny

      • Björn Tantau
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        52 days ago

        Currently before establishing an encrypted connection to a webserver the domain is sent to the webserver unencrypted so that the server can choose the appropriate certificate to use for encryption. That is called SNI, Server Name Indication.

        Of course that’s a privacy risk. There are finally protocols to fix this but they aren’t very widespread and depend on DNS over HTTPS.

        I think issuing certificates based on the IP and sending the domain name encrypted based on that certificate could have fixed this issue ages ago.

    • Melmi
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      2 days ago

      I don’t see how? Normal HTTP/TLS validation would still apply so you’d need port forwarding. You can’t host anything on the CGNAT IP so you can’t pass validation and they won’t issue you a cert.

      • @[email protected]
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        02 days ago

        You can totally host something on carrier-grade NAT using techniques like NAT hole punching.

        • @[email protected]
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          62 days ago

          You don’t get control of the incoming port that way. For LetsEncrypt to issue a certificate primarily intended for HTTPS, they will check that the HTTP server on that IP is owned by the requesting party. That has to live on port 80, which you can’t forward on CGNAT.

    • @[email protected]
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      12 days ago

      They will require the requester to prove they control the standard http(s) ports, which isn’t possible with any nat.

      It won’t work for such users, but also wouldn’t enable any sort of false claims over a shared IP.