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by bigiain 336 days ago
That's not correct.

LetEncrypt are trialling ip address https/TLS certificates right now:

https://letsencrypt.org/2025/07/01/issuing-our-first-ip-addr...

They say:

"In principle, there’s no reason that a certificate couldn’t be issued for an IP address rather than a domain name, and in fact the technical and policy standards for certificates have always allowed this, with a handful of certificate authorities offering this service on a small scale."
1 comments
noduerme 336 days ago
right, this was announced about two weeks ago to some fanfare. So in principle there was no reason not to do it two decades ago? It would've been nice back then. I never heard of any certificate authority offering that.
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fs111 336 days ago
> I never heard of any certificate authority offering that.

DigiCert does. That is where 1.1.1.1 and 9.9.9.9 get their valid certificates from

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crabique 336 days ago
Most CAs offer them, the only requirement is that it's at least an OV (not DV) level cert, and the subject organization proves it owns the IP address.
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bombcar 336 days ago
It the beginning of HTTPS you were supposed to look for the padlock to prove if was a safe site. Scammers wouldn’t take the time and money to get a cert, after all!

So certs were often tied with identity which an IP really isn’t so few providers offered them.

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kbolino 336 days ago
An IP is about as much of an identity as a domain is.

There are two main reasons IP certificates were not widely used in the past:

- Before the SAN extension, there was just the CN, and there's only one CN per certificate. It would generally be a waste to set your only CN to a single IP address (or spend more money on more certs and the infrastructure to maintain them). A domain can resolve to multiple IPs, which can also be changed over time; users usually want to go to e.g. microsoft.com, not whatever IP that currently resolves to. We've had SANs for awhile now, so this limitation is gone.

- Domain validation (serve this random DNS record) involves ordinary forward-lookup records under your domain. Trying to validate IP addresses over DNS would involve adding records to the reverse-lookup in-addr.arpa domain which varies in difficulty from annoying (you work for a large org that owns its own /8, /16, or /24) to impossible (you lease out a small number of unrelated IPs from a bottom-dollar ISP). IP addresses are much more doable now thanks to HTTP validation (serve this random page on port 80), but that was an unnecessary/unsupported modality before.

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