Does anyone remember how we renewed certificates before LE? Yeah, private keys were being sent via email as zip attachments. That was a security charade. And as far as I know, it was a norm among CAs (I remember working with several).
Thank you Let's Encrypt.
I generate the new key on the server as part of the csr creation process. I run it on the server itself so the key never leaves the server's internal storage.
CSR gets sent off to globalsign (via a third party because #largeCompany), then a couple of days later I get the certificate back and apply to the server
Would love to use ACME instead, and store the key in memory (ramdrive etc), but these are the downsides of working for a company less agile than an oil-tanker
(I was only slightly involved with a couple of TLS certificates before then, and certainly they enforced the CSR approach, but maybe such terrible practice was more common in the real world that I knew.)
Internally, perhaps. And also on a small scale maybe with CA "resellers" who were often shady outfits which were in it for a quick buck and didn't much care about the rules.
But as a formal issuance mechanism I very much doubt it. The public CAs are prohibited from knowing the private key for a certificate they issue. Indeed there's a fun incident some years back where a reseller (who have been squirrelling away such private keys) just sends them all to the issuing CA, apparently thinking this is some sort of trump card - and so the issuing CA just... revokes all those certificates immediately because they're prohibited from knowing these private keys.
The correct thing to do, and indeed the thing ACME is doing, although not the interesting part of the protocol, is to produce a Certificate Signing Request. This data structure goes roughly as follows: Dear Certificate Authority, I am Some Internet Name [and maybe more than one], and here is some other facts you may be entitled to certify about me. You will observe that this document is signed, proving I know a Private Key P. Please issue me a certificate, with my name and other details, showing that you associate those details with this key P which you don't know. Signed, P.
This actually means (with ACME or without) that you can successfully air gap the certificate issuance process, with the machine that knows the private key actually never talking to a Certificate Authority at all and the private key never leaving that machine. That's not how most people do it because they aren't paranoid, but it's been eminently possible for decades.
But the point still stands: the whole process was a nightmare, no automation, error prone, renewal easily forgetable...
The large companies could have had a staff to manage all that. I was just a solo developer managing my own projects, and it was a hassle.
That sounds like a fun story. I'd love to read the post-mortem if it's public.
You can sort of do some hacks with scripting this together via things like terraform, cron jobs, or whatever. But it gets ugly and the failure modes are that your site stops working if for whatever reason the certificates fail to renew (I've had this happen), which courtesy of really short life times for certificates is of course often.
So, I paid the wildcard certificate tax a few days ago so I don't have to break my brain over this. A couple of hundred. Makes me feel dirty but it really isn't worth days of my time to dodge this for the cost of effectively < 2 hours of my time in $. Twenty minute job to issue the csr, get the certificate and copy it over to the relevant load balancers.
https://www.theregister.com/2018/03/01/trustico_digicert_sym...
[Edited: I originally said Trustico was out of business, but astoundingly the company is still trading. I have no Earthly idea why you would pay incompetent people to do something that's actually zero cost at point of use, but er... OK]
The claims from Trustico are very silly. They want their customers to believe everything is fine, and yet the only possible way for this event to even occur is that Trustico are at best incompetent. To me this seems like one of those Gerald Ratner things where you make it clear that your product is garbage and so, usually the result is that your customers won't buy it because if they believe you it's garbage and if they don't believe you they won't want your product anyway - but whereas Ratner more or less destroyed a successful business, Trustico is still going.