When doing this, you see that some people feel that you are being pedantic.
And the biggest issue is that it creates confusion.
During calls with customers, when I tell that we're going to setup their TLS certs, they reply, worried: "no, we need SSL certs!".
I see it as another chicken & egg situation: regular people don't know about TLS, and business are afraid of communicating about TLS because they don't want their customer going elsewhere because they don't understand what TLS is and want SSL
There are no TLS certs, it's x509 certs :) SSL certificate is still the name used by everybody though. For the protocol, TLS is correct (apart from SSLv3 which is very deprecated).
actually we wrote this many years ago and left mozilla ans nobody is really updating it other than adding new configs. its not super useful anymore :)
at the time it made sense to us because you couldnt have good SSL configuration everywhere (it was not well supported) so we had trade-offs and created tiers of configs. We barely had TLS coming out, so SSL eas still the name of the game.
nowaday just use the latest TLS defaults and you're golden.
Back in the day, SSL didn't exists. When it came into existence, it was quite an expensive novelty.
It became a generic name that everyone knew for encrypted HTTP connections. It still is a generic name for that, even though the underlying protocol changed name to TLS.
The main answer is a lot of the software on that page predates SSLs deprecation and people (sysadmins especially, because they wrote some bash script 20 years ago and want it to keep working) like backwards compatibility.
We do or will until Certificate lifespan changes. We have customers cert pinning our API cert at work (shitty Enterprise security practices) so constant 60 days rotation with LE or ZeroSSL caused endless support heartache because these enterprise customers demanded we tell them when and what new fingerprint was.
So, 1-year certs and renew 60 days out, send out new fingerprint and at 30 days, we would occasionally swap it in and out as brownout with replacement at 15 days.
We have already indicated when it drops to 100 days, we will swap to automation and no longer communicate when changes will occur. Account Managers are already getting push back from customers. It's possible we will continue using Digicert because they seem to promise that Intermediate certs won't rotate unlike Let's Encrypt which rotates them more frequently which is better security practice. So Enterprise customers will cert pin to Intermediate instead.
Lots of people, I certainly don't trust free providers, and I think it's a lot less likely that malware will use a non-free cert, so some people trust those more. Plus there are email, code-signing and other cert types that aren't provided for free.
What does this mean in practice? Do you remove the free providers from your OS & browser trust stores? Does this mean you get warnings every time you visit a site that uses LetsEncrypt (and other free providers)?
In what way is a non-profit such as Lets Encrypt attempting to monetize their customer relationships? They've issued more 700 million certificates at no cost.
While I don't get the cynicism in this case, you would agree supporting a secure web is in the public interest, right?
To each their own, but you do realize that you are using a free website running on free software secured by free TLS libraries transmitted via routers that often run free software and firmware? Also how much did you pay for the browser you used to make these comments?
There is a sea of difference between something like Google/Facebook/TikTok and Let’s Encrypt/the Linux Foundation/FSF/etc. I can only assume you can’t see that difference if you have spent no time reading about these things, but I would encourage you to. This stuff is important especially if you get to make security decisions for any kind of product.
I would have that concern, at minimum 100x more with random shitty unreliable SSL providers, than those being run by literal huge nerds and non-profits. Your analysis here is thin and lazy and that's being generous to your analysis.
I think this concern is reflects a misunderstanding of how the security of the WebPKI works. Specifically, any CA can issue certificates for your domain whether you are their customer or not. What that means is that if CA #1 is compromised but you choose CA #2, CA #1 can still be used to attack connections to your domain.
The situation is slightly worse if the CA you actually use is compromised because the main defense we have against misissuance is Certificate Transparency, and it's easier to detect that a certificate was issued by a CA you don't use than that too many certificates were issued by a CA you do use, but it's just slightly easier.
The bottom line here is that if you are worried about some group of CAs being compromised, then using a different CA doesn't help you much.
> Yes I understand all of that, but I still choose to trust free services less.
Well, you can choose to do whatever you want, but given that you're posting to a public forum, it would be helpful if you actually explained your reasoning.
> Of course the (more secure?) alternative would be to generate self-signed certs, but for customer-facing sites that's a big UX problem.
It's not just a big UX problem, it's a big security problem, because the customers have no way of knowing if your certificate is actually valid.
> it would be helpful if you actually explained your reasoning.
It's exceedingly clear that's not going to happen, and I think we all know why. Good reminder to anyone that anyone can just post here. Including people that logic-lessly think that paying a shitty third party that probably has a bad track record is somehow better than using LE. Like, this isn't a serious conversation?
The name was changed from SSL to TLS as part of the adoption in IETF. I imagine different people had different motivations, but in part it was a signal that it was going to be controlled by IETF rather than Netscape.
As far as compatibility goes, TLS is backward compatible with SSLv3 [0] in that the client can send a ClientHello that is acceptable to both SSLv3 and TLS servers and the server can select the version to use.
Re: the version number, we're now on TLS 1.3, so I guess that would be SSLv7.
[0] The situation is more complicated with SSLv2, which had a different ClientHello format.
I did this recently then put it in my Tupperware (which most people have never seen or used since it was only sold at those at home Tupperware parties and not at stores).
I had to double check my nginx configuration and the variables use SSL in the names even though I define the protocol to be TLS. I have the certbot commands and their naming conventions use SSL. Perhaps you've never actually implemented SSL or TLS and just use the latest tech jargon to fake understanding?
ElGamal says he uses them interchangeably. He says TLS exists for historical reasons, but the essence of the technology is the same. I got into the habit of using SSL/TLS.
