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by ryan29 2037 days ago
There's also a lot of opportunity for CAs to get better IMO, so competition is useful. I'd hate to see a commercial company displace LE, but there are so many value adds that can be sold once you're the CA of choice that it seems inevitable that a commercial CA with a LE style free tier is going to have a lot of opportunity.

IMO the biggest, easiest feature no CA has implemented is CTLog monitoring / reconciliation. The problem I have with LE even on a small scale is that I'm grabbing certificates for ~20 (sub)domains. I also have several of them set up via Cloudflare. With CTLog monitoring notifications (via Cloudflare and Facebook), I get too many notifications. I don't know what's coming or going or which machines are requesting certificates for which (sub)domains.

A service like ZeroSSL is already acting like a central point of certificate management (for me), so it's the ideal location to do CTLog monitoring since the bulk of certificate issuances happen there. That means legitimate CTLog entries can be reconciled and ignored silently (they'll already show up in the dashboard).

I'm not sure how user accounts work in ACME, but the other thing I'd like is to be able to track which user or machine requested a certificate.

I'm sure something like that could also be built as a proxy. I thought about trying once, but it's firmly in my "things I'll never get to" idea box. Lol.

Another problem I've had with LE that could use a solution is a 3rd party service that I signed up for requesting certificates, but not installing them correctly and hitting the LE limits for that domain. If the mindshare changes from LE to ACME, maybe there'll be a day where 3rd parties will let me specify an ACME provider and link it to my main account somehow.

2 comments

ACME has a concept of EAB (external account binding) credentials, basically like an API key. https://zerossl.com/documentation/acme/ Caddy supports this, so what you want to do should be covered.
Have you considered a wildcard cert?