Let’s Encrypt begins issuing IP address certificates, expanding support beyond domain names to cater to specialized use cases, such as DoH and home devices.

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.
  • Vorpal@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    4 hours 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.