I’m curious what the benefits are of paying for SSL certificates vs using a free provider such as letsencrypt.

What exactly are you trusting a cert provider with and what are the security implications? What attack vectors do you open yourself up to when trusting a certificate authority with your websites’ certificates?

In what way could it benefit security and/or privacy to utilize a paid service?

And finally, which paid SSL providers are considered trustworthy?

I know Digicert is a big player, but their prices are insane. Comodo seems like a good affordable option, but is it a trustworthy company?

  • Mike1576218English
    1·
    3 days ago

    Certificate pinning?

    Also all let’s encrypt certs are public. So if someone malicious gets a cert for your domain, you can notice.

    (Thats also why it may be a bad idea to use that for secretButPublicStuff.Yourdomain.com certificate transparency logs are a great way to find attack surface.)

    edit oh certificate pinning has been deprecated in favor of checking transparency logs.