certificates VS boulder

You can roll your own with https://github.com/smallstep/certificates. We maintain major open source projects and contribute a lot to other projects. I don’t think that means everything we do has to be open source. Sorry this one wasn’t. Doing this in pure open source would be a book, not a blog post.

Love Let’s Encrypt — we’re sponsors — but using them for WiFi is a terrible idea. You need internal PKI for WiFi.

letsencrypt was always about moving the public internet off of http, it doesn't really make sense to use it throughout your internal network. but if you really want TLS and ACME for auto renewal, other solutions are available: https://github.com/smallstep/certificates

You could try step-ca: https://github.com/smallstep/certificates. There’s an OIDC provisioner for SSO and you can sign (short-lived) SSH certificates with it.

You could also check out out Step CA: https://github.com/smallstep/certificates and the accompanying CLI. It has an ACME server and other methods for requesting certificates. It can work/integrate with your existing root(s), too.

This is a lot more complicated setup but it works for me. I run a private CA called step-ca from smallstep and it provides CA and ACME endpoint. I use a .home domain. The trick is the validation for non-http devices which is typically the DNS-01 challenge. For this, I have unbound in pfsense setup to work with acme-dns so I can keep everything internal. Again its complicated but if your learning cyber security it might help get a handle on all things TLS. Btw way behind the scenes I think the ACME plugin is really just running acme.sh bash script which is really good. Final reminder as other have stated. Private CA is great but you need to distro the roots and intermediates out to your clients for trust. If all your trying to do is have an https web gui for pfsense from one device its pretty easy.

Just a little heads up https://smallstep.com/certificates/

Step-ca: Not web based, but the CLI is pretty user friendly: https://smallstep.com/certificates/

I was just looking at https://smallstep.com/certificates a few days ago. It looks like they have an operator that fits your description as well as example docs for setting up inter-microservice mtls.

There's no reason you couldn't run your own ACME server (the Let's Encrypt folk publish an open source one, boulder, but there's plenty of others). Then you can just use certbot in your VMs to manage certificates, configured to point to your CA server instead of the Let's Encrypt one.

Let's Encrypt's ACME server is open source: https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder

GP's post prompted me to look into LE's ACME server implementation, Boulder [1], but it's pretty apparent that Boulder is not suitable for small scale deployments. But the smallstep "certificates" project seems to be a lot more reasonable for this use-case. Thanks for sharing, I'll definitely check it out!

[1]: https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder

There's also Boulder too which supposedly is what Let's Encrypt actually runs. But, I believe you have be running Python or Docker on your Linux server, where SmallStep didn't have that requirement.

Actually it is Open Source (I'd say "Free Software" but they're the same thing). The software that makes the CA work, Boulder, is here: https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder and the end user software to get certificates which now called CertBot but was once just named "letsencrypt" is here: https://github.com/certbot/certbot

Why are you assuming that their workload includes just one query per emitted certificate?

The reality is that they are storing information during challenges, implementing rate limiting per-account, supporting OCSP validation and a few other things.

You can investigate further if you really want to see the queries that they make against the database since their software (Boulder) is open source [1]. Most queries are in the files in the "sa" (storage authority) folder.

[1] https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder/

They won't pay any licensing fees at all when their whole stack is open source. They even wrote their own CA from scratch.