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.
F I N A L L Y
Now tell me it supports IPv6 and I’ll be the happiest man alive
I never understood why we don’t use IP certificates to encrypt the domain with SNI.
What do you mean?
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.
Would this work with a public dynamic DNS?
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.
Can I get a cert for 127.0.0.1 ? /s
How many bits is a /s mask?
i
8
The down votes are from people who work in IT support that have to deal with idiots that play with things they dont understand.
nah, I was once an idiot who didn’t understand so idgaf
It’s unfortunate they don’t know what /s means
We do, it’s just that those users will also often go “nah, I’m just joking!” then do some shit anyways.
How do I setup a reverse proxy for pure TCP? /s
Think that’s called NATing
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.
I use a domain, but for homelab I eventually switched to my own internal CA.
Instead of having to do
service.domain.tldit’s nice to doservice.lan.Any good instructions you would recommend for doing this?
I just use openssl"s built in management. I have scripts that set it up and generate a
.landomain, and instructions for adding it to clients. I could make a repo and writeup if you would like?As the other commenter pointed out,
.lanis not officially sanctioned for local use, but it is not used publicly and is a common choice. However you could use whatever you want.use the official home.arpa as specified in RFC 8375
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.lanfor 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.
.homeand.homenetwere proposed, but this is from the mailing list:- we cannot be sure that using .home is consistent with the existing (ab)use
- 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.
FYI you can get a numeric xyz domain for 1$ a year
At least for the first year.
Pretty sure it remains $1. But it’s specifically only 6-9 digit numeric .xyz domains.
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.
but for the love of god and your own benefit, put a name constraint directly on the root cert
Its like self signed certs with the convience of a third party
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.
Hell yuh.
Couldn’t this prove very troublesome in combination with carrier grade nat?
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.
You can totally host something on carrier-grade NAT using techniques like NAT hole punching.
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.
