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by drummer 2316 days ago
I suppose it would be trivial for them to issue compromised certificates or record the private key in a targetted attack for a specific domain without anyone noticing.
2 comments

During normal certificate issuance, they do not generate or see the private key, so they can't compromise the certs they sign for you.

Like any other CA, they do have the technical ability to sign arbitrary other certs, so could issue a cert for MITM. As some other comments show, certificate transparency is starting to reduce this risk.

LE does not see the private key but certbot does. Who audits certbot?
Anyone. It's open source. You can if you'd like.

https://github.com/certbot/certbot

Would be trivial except for the fact that they don't issue certificates.