We are discussing why, when and how SSL certificates went from very expensive and infrequent to free and only valid for 30 days.
SSL Certificates weren’t always free, you know?
They once cost a fair chunk of cash , had long, mandatory minimum expiry times in the range of years rather than months with costs ranging into the thousands.
The certification process was more involved too, with some authorities requiring you confirm your business address and legitimacy, physically!
These days your cloud provider or LetsEncrypt will give you never-ending certificates for FREE! So what happened?
How and why did the industry shift?
First Things First
Let’s take a step back to review what SSL/TLS infrastructure looks like.
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) & Private Key Infrastructure (PKI) is the technology behind the familiar URL protocol:
HTTPS://my-secure-domain.com/
This connection ensures not only that your data is encrypted in transit to the server, but also that you’re communicating with the party you expect.
It achieves this through a certificate signing process which involves a Root CA (Certificate Authority) which has the responsibility of creating certificates for a given entity (a web server, usually) which are signed by it. At the same time, this Root CA has its “client side certs” already (check it out!) embedded inside your Operating System and/or web browser.
Say you’re Bob, and Bob loves using Chrome to visit their favourite website,
Google’s web-server has a certificate installed which is served up on port 443 to Bob, signed by [Some CA named Z]. Bob’s Chrome Browser has an embedded certificate installed which was created by [Some CA named Z] and this certificate is able to verify that it the server, is authentic.
This connection relationship is largely about trust. The Chrome browser’s client cert trusts ANY certificate signed by the same CA. So long as it has not expired or been revoked.
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The full story is available for FREE here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/danktec/p/the-rise-of-the-free-ssl-certificate
