I’m curious what the benefits are of paying for SSL certificates vs using a free provider such as letsencrypt.

What exactly are you trusting a cert provider with and what are the security implications? What attack vectors do you open yourself up to when trusting a certificate authority with your websites’ certificates?

In what way could it benefit security and/or privacy to utilize a paid service?

And finally, which paid SSL providers are considered trustworthy?

I know Digicert is a big player, but their prices are insane. Comodo seems like a good affordable option, but is it a trustworthy company?

  • Scott@lem.free.asEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    Untrue. I work for a global enterprise company that transacts hundreds of millions of dollars via LE certs.

    • d416@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      I work for a global enterprise company that transacts hundreds of millions of dollars via LE certs.

      The B2B use case isn’t quite what I was referring to with respect to the type of trust required for first time or consumer transactions such as ecommerce. That said, this enterprise doesn’t sound federally regulated at all because if it were, it wouldn’t be using Let’s Encrypt.

    • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.meEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      I believe you, but I also very much believe that there are security vendors out there demonizing LE and free stuff in general. The more expensive equals better more serious thinking is unfortunately still quite present, especially in big corps. Big corps also seem to like the concept of having to prove yourself with a high price of entry, they just can’t believe a tiny company could possibly have a better product.

      That doesn’t make it any less ridiculous, but I believe it. I’ve definitely heard my share of “we must use $sketchyVendor because $dubiousReason”. I’ve had to install ClamAV on readonly diskless VMs at work because otherwise customers refuse to sign because “we have no security systems”. Everything has to be TLS encrypted, even if it goes to localhost. Box checkers vs common sense.