Bonum Certa Men Certa

Let's Encrypt is Garbage, Albeit It's Disguised as 'Free' Privacy

Earlier this year (an unexplained incident, still): Techrights Urges Readers to Ask the Linux Foundation's Let's Encrypt (Backed by Companies That Give the NSA Back Doors) Some Hard But Legitimate Questions

Let's Encrypt address

Let's Encrypt LF connection

Let's Encrypt and LF

The signature for Let's Encrypt

Source: The latest-available IRS filing. See the IRS filing in full [PDF] for a lot more.

Summary: The 'Linux' Foundation in 'privacy' clothing is more like a monopoly disguised as non-profit while taking money from monopolies (to do their biddings in the most surveillance-intensive country in the entire world)

Yesterday we asserted (and then explained why) today's Linux Foundation -- or LF for short (one way to avoid the misleading name) -- works for monopolies, not Linux. It uses the "Linux" brand to market itself.



One thing that came from LF is a CA that issues loads and loads of certificates which expire after 3 months.

"The aspect nobody wishes to talk about is that the Let's Encrypt monopoly is reinforcing monopoly and monopolies (Let's Encrypt itself is fast becoming a monopoly and it helps large companies further monpolise and thus centralise the Web)."Look who backs this. Look who funds this. Look where the code is hosted (proprietary Microsoft GitHub). Even the site itself is outsourced to proprietary Microsoft GitHub...

Let's Encrypt is partly funded by Microsoft/GitHub and various other unsavoury companies notorious for their back doors (we can name more than a handful).

So much for security, considering how close Microsoft and the NSA have long been.

But that's not the point. That's not the most important thing.

The aspect nobody wishes to talk about is that the Let's Encrypt monopoly is reinforcing monopoly and monopolies (Let's Encrypt itself is fast becoming a monopoly and it helps large companies further monpolise and thus centralise the Web).

It may sound peculiar at first, but considering the FIDO situation we've seen it elsewhere as well. Much power can be gained -- sometimes money follows -- by making oneself the de facto standard. Then abuse and chaos may ensue, as monopolies need not compete and appease/please anyboby.

Yesterday the Let's Encrypt site published a blog post which bears a rather meaningless if not misleading headline (because a suitable headline would likely upset people right from the get-go).

Put in simple terms, sites that adopt HTTPS with the 'free' (so-called, hence scare quotes) Let's Encrypt will become inaccessible to a lot of visitors. In the name of fake 'privacy', which does nothing about spying at the endpoints (like data sales to brokers). People who think HTTPS 'means privacy' should remind themselves that companies like Facebook -- a Let's Encrypt sponsor -- use HTTPS and it does nothing to prevent Facebook from assaulting privacy like Microsoft assaults love itself. HTTPS helps secure things not at the endpoints but during transit.

LWN's headline was vastly more informative than the waffle from Let's Encrypt and it said:

Fallout from upcoming Let's Encrypt certificate changes



As described in this Let's Encrypt blog entry, certificates issued by Let's Encrypt will soon be signed solely by that organization's own root certificate, which is accepted by all modern browsers. There is one little catch, though: versions of Android prior to 7.1.1 (released in late 2016) do not recognize that certificate and will start throwing errors. "Currently, 66.2% of Android devices are running version 7.1 or above. The remaining 33.8% of Android devices will eventually start getting certificate errors when users visit sites that have a Let’s Encrypt certificate. In our communications with large integrators, we have found that this represents around 1-5% of traffic to their sites." There appears to be little to be done about this problem other than to encourage owners of older Android devices to install Firefox.


It quotes part of what Jacob Hoffman-Andrews said, followed by: "Hopefully these numbers will be lower by the time DST Root X3 expires next year, but the change may not be very significant."

Next year?

Let's Encrypt moneyJust one year? Hardly anything would change by then. See the comments in LWN. One person said: "Rooting old phones requires erasing them. I'd hazard that the users of those phones would be cautious about that (data loss), as opposed to current phones (loss of access to baking and game apps)."

They're pushing people to buy new so-called 'phones' (spying devices). And further down it says: "Plausibly deniable way to send users up the upgrade treadmill. C'mon, Android users! Throw away your devices, again!"

Why would anyone wish to turn away users in the name of fake 'privacy' or dubious levels of confidentiality? If the Let's Encrypt folks somehow hand over keys to the government (e.g. under Trump NSLs), then what good is it really? It not only helps monopolies but also militant empires.

Let's Encrypt may claim to be a liberating and democratising force, but that's assuming it does what it says on the tin.

An encrypted systems specialist elaborated on this. "Trust should only exist between the provider of data and the consumer," he said to us. "Any other third party introduced into the system is an attack against privacy, security, and autonomy. Don't let quacks convince you otherwise."

"The discussion should lead the user to devices and browsers that let them have a local list of public keys they trust. That's the basic function of TLS anyways. The concept of a CA needs to be binned altogether. You can still trust certs yourself on Firefox. Just ignore the browser warnings."

He added that "what [we] should tell users is to start trusting self-signed certificates in favour of certs provided by CAs. Let's Encrypt is a vehicle for maintaining the trust monopoly. It's free so people blindly just use it, without realising they're just further entrenching the trust monopoly. Anyone can generate TLS certs with openssl (or even more secure libressl; libressl is by the OpenBSD team. It's the best TLS software around. There's nothing magical about TLS certificates. If someone has something like WordPress, you can just use libressl to generate your own certs and then put a banner on the top of your info page on your website asking users to trust whichever cert you generated and hasn't expired [and] what we really need in a truly security-and-privacy respecting Web browser is one that rejects all TLS certificates by default and only accepts certs the user agrees to accept. Right now the situation is the opposite of what it should be. Users have monopolised "trust providers" dictate which certs they accept. Kind of how you do when you set up SSH. You block all public keys by default and only allow ones you trust yourself. And you, the user, have full control of your trust system. Delegation of trust mechanisms to third parties is flagrant stupidity in any security system. In summary: right now you, the user, have a dictator ordering you whom you can and cannot trust. This is absurd. Your devices and software shouldn't stop functioning when you want to take back control over your trust. The current system is a dictatorship of CAs forcing people to give up control over their trust (and by extension, their security and privacy). These are abuses against articles 12 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

Don't forget that Let's Encrypt is US-based and monopolies-backed. They're not a charity, not a nonprofit either. They have motivations that aren't altruistic and we know who pays the salaries (not friends and allies of privacy, sometimes foes of it). They call themselves "[a] nonprofit Certificate Authority providing TLS certificates to 225 million websites." The Linux Foundation also calls itself "nonprofit", but we know that's a lie.

The encrypted systems specialist said he "[had] forgot[ten] to mention one other big point. The fact you can't block CAs in your browser and certain certificates is evidence enough of the malice behind the design and implementation of the web today."

The incidents of March (earlier this year) could be seen as an eye-opener. They never bothered explaining why they had issued millions of bad certificates, which they later revoked; they didn't explain what actually caused this incident and what was done about it.

As a side note, the SELinux project of Red Hat (now IBM) used to issue monthly declarations about no government interventions/involvement. Those stopped years ago. What is it they say about canaries?

"I have never seen any letsencrypt documentation say they have canaries," oiaohm wrote this morning, "and if you know USA law on the matter canaries is basically false. One of the USA encrypted email systems that is shutdown now had canaries and when the NSA with NSL stepped in they were forbid from using them. So their end users knew nothing."

A lot more discussion regarding this issue can be found in tomorrow's IRC logs.

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

Confirmed in the Mainstream Media: A Lot of Microsoft "Workloads" Were Just LLM Slop (Helping to Fake Growth for Years, as Microsoft Had Paid "Open" "AI" to Become a "Client") and Demand is Rapidly Waning, Datacentres Canceled and/or Shut Down
Anything to facilitate further accounting fraud
Taiwan's Media Covers Closure of Microsoft's "AI" Lab, It's Time to Talk About the Gradual Death of Windows and Implosion of the "AI" Bubble
Earlier this week we showed that mostly Asian media had the 'nerve' to mention Microsoft silently shutting down its 'AI' lab
More Gains for GNU/Linux, Based on Web Surveys
the Steam site shows rapid growth for "Linux" this month
 
Brett Wilson LLP Reported to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)
The saddest thing in all this is that law firms can maintain high standards shall they wish to
Links 03/04/2025: Tariff Pains and C.D.C. Cuts
Links for the day
StatCounter: Microsoft is Masking a Disaster, It's Way Behind DeepSeek Already and Interest in LLMs Has Waned
it turns out the money "raised" for "Open" "AI" may not even exist at all
Links 03/04/2025: SoftBank Money for Microsoft "Open" "AI" Probably Doesn't Even Exist, Wikimedia Foundation Blasts LLM Nuisance While Microsoft Admits Demand Has Shrunk
Links for the day
Gemini Links 03/04/2025: Patch Panel and Pictures
Links for the day
Islamic Republic of Iran: GNU/Linux at All-time High This Month, Windows Falls to 12%
Vista 10 is up this month despite being "end of life" (EoL) soon
Indonesia: All-Time Highs for GNU/Linux
What's noteworthy right now is the growth of GNU/Linux
statCounter Says GNU/Linux Usage is Up Again (Internationally)
some preliminary April data
Only on April 1st Can the Free Software Foundation Associate With Microsoft's Open Source Initiative (OSI)
We saw some pranks that day linking the FSF to Microsoft (e.g. "endorsing" Windows)
IBM Gets Rid of Kelly Chambliss as Mass Layoffs Reported in IBM Consulting, IBM Loses Key Contracts/Graft
IBM Consulting has been in disarray lately
Slopwatch: Anti-Linux Articles, Not Even Written by Humans
Why aren't Web sites more vocal about this problem?
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, April 02, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, April 02, 2025
Links 03/04/2025: Apple Fined Over Secret Surveillance, "Elegant Writer For A More Civilized Age"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 02/04/2025: Books and Cold Tea
Links for the day
Links 02/04/2025: More Layoffs, Nokia Again Takes Advantage of Illegal and Unconstitutional Patent Court With Nokia Staff as 'Judges'
Links for the day
Links 02/04/2025: Seizures and Returns to Windows of 24 Years Ago
Links for the day
LLM Slop Helps Obscure and Distort News About Layoffs (IBM, GAFAM)
It's hard to find accurate information
Links 02/04/2025: Microsoft Developers Are Threatening to Go on Strike, World Backup Day Noted
Links for the day
Gemini Protocol Has Growing Appeal (the Web Got Too Bloated and Full of LLM Slop)
For any "data plan" with bandwidth limits or "tiers" it would be cheaper to use/browse Geminispace
The Web Can Survive LLM Slop, But Only If We Collectively Shun and Discourage Serial Sloppers
Doing nothing ought not be a possibility
Amid Secret Shut-downs and Mass Layoffs at Microsoft (4 Waves of Layoffs in 3 Months of 2025) Some Microsoft Staff Expected to Go On Strike
workers going on strike
Gemini Links 02/04/2025: No more on Mastodon and Gemini Mention Script in Go
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, April 01, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, April 01, 2025
My Motion Disbarring or “Striking Off” Brett Wilson LLP for Enabling Violent Americans Who Try to Crush Microsoft Critics in the United Kingdom by Multiple SLAPPs
"Guns for hire" (for Microsoft people who received Microsoft salaries)
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Hijacked Again by Patent Litigation Industry, as President Cheeto Prioritises Aggressors
The "mafia" has taken over the "industry" and the Federal system (justice and constitutions trampled upon)
Ubuntu Slop and FUD Manufactured With LLMs and Funded (by Oneself) 'Studies'
Slop and FUD are ruining the Web
Gemini Links 01/04/2025: Games and More
Links for the day
Links 01/04/2025: Apple Fined $162M for Privacy Abuses, Disinformation Online a Growing Concern
Links for the day
Why We're Reporting Brett Wilson LLP for Apparently Misusing Their Licence to Protect American Microsofters Who Attack Women
For those who have not been keeping abreast
Newer Press Reports Confirm That Microsoft Shuts Down 'Hey Hi' (AI) Labs Despite All the Hype
The "hey hi" (AI) bubble is not sustainable
Links 01/04/2025: Mass Layoffs at Eidos and "Microsoft Pulls Back on Data Centers" (Demand Lacking); "Racist and Sexist" Slop From Microsoft
Links for the day
Stefano Maffulli and His Microsoft-Funded OSI Staff Are Killing the OSI and Killing "Open Source" (All for Money!)
This is far from over
Gemini Links 01/04/2025: XKCDpunk and worldclock.py
Links for the day
50 Years of Sabotage and a Gut Punch to Computer Science (and Science in General)
Will we get back to science-based computing rather than cult-like following?
Techrights Headlines as Semaphore
"If you are hearing this, thank you"
3 Months in 2025, 4 Waves of Mass Layoffs at Microsoft, Now Offices Shut Down Permanently
"A recent visit by the South China Morning Post confirmed that the office was dark, unoccupied, and had its logo removed."
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, March 31, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, March 31, 2025