![]() R3 Certificate Expiry And The Chain Of Trust… Otherwise, you get a Security Warning like the one below. If it makes it all the way to the root and finds it in its “store,” the chain is validated, and the connection is allowed to proceed. Validation process: Your browser “walks” the chain of trust, from the server certificate up to the root.These intermediate certificates are what it thinks you might need to connect the chain of trust from the server certificate to one of the root certificates you installed on your computer. It might also send you one or more intermediate certificates. Intermediate certificates: When you go to the HTTPS website, the server hosting the website sends the certificate during the SSL handshake with the client (browser/HTTP client). ![]() In this way, there is a chain of trust from the website’s certificate all the way to the root certificate. Some have their own Root certificate and others have a Certificate Authority certificate, which was signed by one of the Root certificates or by another Certificate Authority. Therefore, they purchase a certificate from a provider. Chain of Trust: When someone launches a website nowadays, they must support HTTPS.At this moment, the MacOS laptop I’m writing this on has 161 “System Root certificates” installed. If you have a computer that can connect to an HTTPS website, you have such a certificate store. These are issued by major companies under a lot of scrutiny and are installed in the Certificate Stores of computers worldwide by the company that developed and maintains the OS. Root certificates: There are a handful of Root certificates.Here’s a quick summary of how certificate trust works on the Internet: That’s exactly what happened on the evening of September 29 and again on the morning of September 30, 2021. One of them is that Google has been gradually forcing sites to use HTTPS by making HTTP-based sites “not secure.” Still, no matter the cause, in that amount of time Let’s Encrypt has gone from issuing certificates for about 50M websites to over 230M!Īt the same time, it doesn’t matter that I trust Let’s Encrypt if computers don’t. In the last ~8 years (2013-2020), the percent of web pages using HTTPS has gone from 25% to over 84%! There are several reasons for this incredible growth. Whether you’re checking your bank balance, buying a new pair of socks from an e-tailer, or talking to your friends, you do so with the assumption that this transaction is secure. It’s the basis for secure communications. Encryption is extremely important on the Internet. Partially because of them, the number of websites using encryption has skyrocketed in recent years. They’re a great company that’s made certificate management extremely accessible to everyone, and extremely developer-friendly. Do You Trust Let’s Encrypt?īefore we get into the weeds, I just want to say that I, personally, trust Let’s Encrypt. We also share our incident review of the event, so that the learnings will help others. ![]() While this is true for some, it does not solve the problem in general!īelow we explain why, and how to solve it on the server-side so that all of your clients can access your web service without issues. Furthermore, as we work with many vendors, we’ve received updates from some which indicate that solving this problem is as easy as downloading the latest OS updates. The root cause of the crisis was not Catchpoint, our product, or any employee – but an issue with changes to the certificate path by a certificate issuer. The difference with this event was that a lot more servers rely on Let’s Encrypt certificates. ![]() These types of incidents are pretty rare.Īnother example happened in 2020 when the Sectigo AddTrust root certificate expired. They originated from some of our web tests from our synthetic nodes, occurring when our Let’s Encrypt “R3” certificate expired. On September 29, 2021, 19:21:40 UTC, we started to see a tsunami of alerts at Catchpoint. At the same time, we have monitoring for any sudden changes to tests that our customers are running. We have the standard monitoring to make sure that systems are performing properly, data is flowing through our infrastructure, etc. As a monitoring and observability company, we have a lot of monitoring built into our systems, as well.
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