I know that I can simply make my own private certificate authority that only I and my family trust. But is there some public provider like letsencrypt that is in a free-er part of the world than the US?

I don't think anyone is gonna solve that problem until it's actually a problem.

This is why I never even started using Letsencrypt; looking at the fine print, you actually enter into some kind of contract with some US entity under US law, which I don't want even if it's the coolest of all FOSS foundations.

Here's a site that has some info:
https://www.eurotoolkit.eu/categories/certificate-authority-ca
I have used certum.pl for years and it looks like I might go back to them soon because my VPS provider doesn't offer bundled certs anymore.

I used to pay €40/year iirc.
I suspect it's gotten more expensive though.

edit:
oh looks like ZeroSSL are doing it letsencrypt-style with Acme protocol for €0.

edit2:
No, not more expensive. Some of the providers in the above link are labyrinthine and I couldn't even find a Pricing section - usually a sign that it's too expensive at least for a normal consumer - but others offer yearly certs for as little as €30 (taxes not included).

edit3:
Yeah some people are going to have a hard time accepting that a contract with a for-profit company under EU jurisdiction might be preferable to a contract with a non-profit under US jurisdiction.

There are some commercial Certificate Authorities that offer free certificates. But in contrast Let's Encrypt is a non-profit.

• ZeroSSL (Austria)
• Actalis (Italy)

I've been using ZeroSSL for over 5 years and can attest that they are friendly in that I have literally never seen or heard from them.

I've set up and cancelled multiple domains in this time, and have had one domain running for the entirety of my time with ZeroSSL.

I don't think you (OP) are gonna find much better than a for-profit business with a good track record if you're unwilling to use Letsencrypt.

It is a problem, and there are solutions.

This is good to know.

ZeroSSL costs 180 per year for unlimited 90 day certs. I get the independence from US-based services, but I don't want to drop that kind of money on my toy domains.

First let's identify what parts of the world are free-er than the US (for a certificate).

is it possible to get the eff to move elsewhere?

They do sound good, but it's worth pointing out that for a LE equivalent, unlimited 90 day certs, ZeroSSL would cost 180 Euro per year, that's 15 per month. I couldn't find another registry with a comparable offer. They always follow the ancient model of paying for every cert or getting a wildcard cert you have to manually install everywhere. To me, that model is dead. Automatic provisioning and renewal of certs is a must.

And give up the best weather and access to 5 star restaurants in the world? Surely you jest!

What? I'm not paying a dime and I'm not manually inserting certificates.

I'm just repeating what their website says.

I think you should look deeper. Quick google search gave me

https://zerossl.com/features/acme

Oh, no, I was talking about the price. I saw that they have ACME. From that European registry list they seem to be the only ones. But the plan that offers unlimited certs over ACME, equal to LE, costs 15 Euro per month.

I don't think anyone's going to solve the problem in general, to be honest.

Like, Let's Encrypts goal is super novel, but also expensive as shit to actually run, and requires a lot of coordination because it needs to be a trust authority. If this ever happened, it would probably be at the backing of some government structure, because I don't see many people wanting to jump at that as an expense.

Simi-related fun fact.

The biggest contributor to TOR is the CIA. They funded it's creation and are primarily responsible for maintaining it to this day.

The CIA maintains TOR as a way for spies to pass information over the internet. They make it public because if only spies used TOR it would be trivial to catch them. So it's in their interest that it be public and secure. It's open source and security experts agree you can trust it.

What risk are you trying to mitigate, specifically?

If it's the CA taking over your site, control over your CA specifically doesn't really give any advantage to an attacker (they would have to hijack traffic and provide a new certificate - nobody will notice if the certificate is from a different CA).

Note that your CA cannot decrypt the exchanges between your server and its clients.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.

[Thread #107 for this comm, first seen 19th Sep 2026, 15:40]
[FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

commercial

free certificates

How do they make money?

The CIA, not navy intelligence?

The core principle of Tor, known as onion routing, was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, to protect American intelligence communications online.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)

Usually they make money with extended certificates where they not only offer a certificate for example.com but also certify that it belongs to Example Ltd.

Those extended certificates used to show the company name next to address bars, but I don't think browsers do that anymore.

Are you sure they can't decrypt? They have your certificate after all. Besides, if the Orange has a bad day, he can ban certificates export or just for a single company or individual.

Edit: First two sentences were stupid, I apologize.

Yes, the private key never leaves your machine.

You send them a certificate signing request with your public key, they put their verification stamp on it and send it to you.

The only part they have to play is verifying that your certificate is trusted by a root certificate.

Malta or Cyprus maybe? My first thought is places where dodgy people do dodgy shit, like gambling.

The CA cannot decypt: they don't have the secret key which only the server has. When requesting a new certificate from the CA, the server generated a secret key (aka private key) and then generated a derived public key that goes into a Certificate Signing Request (CSR). The CSR is what the CA receives, not the secret key, and then the CA returns the certificate file to the server, which has been endorsed by the CA and thus trusted by the user base.

Phrased another way, a certificate is the instrument that confirms that a purported public key can in-fact be safely used, and that no MITM attack is happening (assuming you trust the CA that signed the cert). But once you've confirmed the public key, the rest of the cryptography is public key cryptography, meaning the secrecy of the secret key is the whole game.

I just self-host Bitwarden. I’d rather not allow the CIA to snoop on my passwords, and if law enforcement serves me a warrant, then I can furnish a list…though, I’m sure they’d just go to the service and ask them because “fuck you” of course.

a certificate for example.com

also certify that it belongs to Example Ltd.

I thought that was the whole point of a certificate, to show that the website belongs to the company? Or nah?

How is this related to the OP?

Nah, the point is to encrypt the traffic and tell you what you are receiving really comes from example.com and not an evil third party.

It opens the possibility of a man-in-the-middle attack.

I think you misunderstood something there; they're very explicitely offering free certs.

I just went 90% through the process (I might need them anyhow later this year), it's like this:
What you say is a PRO feature, unlimited certs with one account, is not meant as "unlimited in time" but "unlimited number of certs at any given time".

I assume you are correct and anybody can get a cert (with max. 1 wildcard presumably) for (again presumably) one site for free?
This @state_electrician is very insistent; do you have any idea what exactly costs €15/month (according to them)? What could they mean by "LE (LetsEncrypt) equivalent"?
They seem to claim that the free cert offer is only for a limited time?

edit:
no, they explained themselves. Apparently LE gives as many free certs for as many domains as you want to any one user.

Ah, right. That's the primary purpose, thank you for the reminder! 🙏

which is still there if you are not using lets encrypt, because they can strongarm them to make a fake cert for your domain, and install a proxy repackaging HTTPS traffic with the fake certificate. all browsers trust the lets encrypt root certificate, so they won't see anything suspicious.

the only thing there today to detect this (but not avoid) is certificate transparency logs. all modern certificates are required to be added to this log, for the CA to remain compliant. but browsers are not checking the logs, that would be a lot of additional traffic and how do they decide if a certificate was created maliciously? also, lets encrypt could afford being noncompliant, browser vendors can't realistically just distrust their root certificate, many sites would become inaccessible.

you don't know how bitwarden works, do you?

It's actually to prove that a web server belongs to (or is trusted by for delivering their content) a specific website.

qualified certificates go a step further, by proving that a web server belongs to a specific company or a real person. but that's costly, because verification is inherently more difficult.

Lost Lemmings?

Oh snap! That definitely sounds possible. Found more info about it.

tl;dr: Either the attack is ineffective against some browsers that check the certificate transparency logs (like Chrome), or the attack is visible and the CA will lose all its credibility (hopefully being removed from the browsers).

They don't have your private key

Yep, that's what I described and any CA accepted by the client can do it

Edit: no, it doesn't. Looking at the comments below, it's public key crypto.

Original comment:

The problem is that if that is your threat model, then the VPS provider, ISP, and literally everything between you and letsencrypt can pull a conpromised key fro letsencrypt.

This actually happened btw, an xmpp server was attacked this way, they compromised not the server itself, but the VPS provider MITMed their traffic: https://www.devever.net/~hl/xmpp-incident

If your threat model involves this, then the only solution is Tor, which eliminates these requirements of trust.

Let's encrypt is very transparent and has been designed to be auditable. What are you worried about exactly?

Maybe I'm mistaken but aren't the logs cryptography verifiable? (As in you can't create a rouge cert without it creating a trace)

The certificate is only used for authentication. The actual data is encrypted with a temporary symmetric key that is generated via a diffie-hellman exchange

Even if they had your private key they still wouldn't be able to decrypt the data

The private key isn't used for encryption

ZeroSSL is probably what OP is looking for

Yeah, that's what I meant. An unlimited number of 90 day certs, automatically renewable through ACME. That's what Let's Encrypt offers and that's what I'd need in another cert provider.

lol ok

It's proven then: Letsencrypt is bigger and better than anything any European even for profit company has to offer.

apparently certs can have a cryptographic proof of having been included in the CT logs. but what do browsers do if the letsencrypt cert has no such proof?