[lxgr]

It really only is for bad practical reasons, that all coincidentally make it harder and harder to self-host stuff locally without paying a few dollars a month or year here and there to various rent seekers.

"Just use Letsencrypt" really is the correct answer for 99% of use cases, but good luck if you find yourself with one from the 1%. You'll get an army of people mindlessly parroting "best practices" and will assume you're incompetent/lazy if you can't find a way to make them work for you.

[User11110]

Internal CAs and self signed certificates are different. You can still generate a CA, sign your certificates, import your own CA into your phone and have that verify your certificates. You don't need Letsencrypt. But you'll learn in time.

[lxgr]

Thanks for the condescension, but I know how to do all of this. I've done it before. And because of that, I can first hand attest that it's way too complicated.

No non-sophisticated user is able to run their own local CA, and that's why their NAS, IoT setup etc. all run over HTTP only, which in turn has implications for available web APIs (thanks to "secure origin only" policies and no exemption for local IPs/zeroconf domains) and many other things.

It also doesn't work for at least modern Android apps, since Android no longer makes user-provided CA certificates available to (non-browser) apps anymore, I believe, unless they're compiled with a special debugging parameter. On iOS it's still possible, but I'm not sure how long it's going to stay that way.

[stephenmac98]

If a user set up a NAS they should be capable of googling

"Openssl how to set up a CA" > First link fully explains it https://arminreiter.com/2022/01/create-your-own-certificate-...

"How to import CA into iPhone" > First link fully explains it https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/mpf/7.1.0?topic=certificates-ins...

"Android app customize trusted CAs" > First link fully explains it https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/security-...

The barrier to entry on PKI isn't that it's hard, it seems to be that people just can't be bothered, PKI is among the most google-able tech processes out there

[lxgr]

Setting up a NAS means buying one on Amazon and plugging it in.

You're completely out of touch with the majority of the userbase of these products if you think even one in 10 NAS users will set up their own CA using OpenSSL (in a secure way that doesn't expose themselves to being MITMed even on public sites such as that of their bank down the road).

[stephenmac98]

In that case the NAS company should, at a minimum, be loading their NAS with a certificate signed by a CA owned by the NAS company, where the trust chain for their NAS's certificates are easily available for users to grab and install.

In an ideal world they would load a letencrypt certificate and set up the tooling required to automatically pull down a new one when required.

A NAS company owned CA doesn't offer much of a benefit directly for the plug-n-play users, but it's still better than just a self signed cert, and for people who care about their security even a little bit it can significantly protection.

Most Plug-n-Play NAS solutions will integrate with a web api and/or an app, and it's more common than it should be that NAS'es are exposed to the internet.

Once you control both the NAS and it's clients, there's absolutely no reason not to preload a complete PKI implementation. Even just an installation app which loaded the chain onto any device you wanted to interact with the NAS would be sufficient.

If NAS'es are intended for non-technical people, then any NAS sold should be secure by default.

[lxgr]

My point is precisely that current browsers and OSes make it impossible to ship a secure-by-default device running a local web server, NAS or otherwise.

Requiring users to install a globally trusted CA is a disaster from a security point of view (now my NAS vendor or anyone that hacks them can pose as google.com!), and for this reason doesn’t even work with modern Android apps anymore, for example.

[digitalPhonix]

How? An internal CA is just a self-signed certificate that you’ve told your device to trust; and to trust other certificates signed by it.

Somewhere you still need to trust a self-signed certificate.

[cpach]

You can guard the root certificate better than the leaf certificate. For example, you can keep it offline in an air-gapped environment.