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by dochtman 38 days ago
A lot of Let’s Encrypt is not the software but a bunch of auditing and process that ensure compliance and make it legible to the required auditors.
1 comments

I understand there's probably a big thorny problem of duplicating the corporate process/policies on the human level that ensure compliance, but is the back-end software pipelining stuff to CT logs not also something that can be replicated? Or is it not part of the server side stuff which has been open sourced?

https://letsencrypt.org/docs/ct-logs/

Our code for sending stuff to CT logs is fully open source. But that's the tiniest slice of our compliance regime -- the vast majority of it is things like audit logging certain events, preserving audit logs in specific ways for certain amounts of time, ensuring dual-controls on all systems, being both audited and penetration tested annually, maintaining firewalls and vulnerability scanning tools, etc.

It's absolutely possible to spin up another new CA; lots of folks have done so over the years. But having time, and money, and prior experience all help a lot.