Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Do you still need wildcard certificates?

You’ve used wildcard certificates for years. It made your life easier. Once a year you’d renew your wildcard certificate, and copy it around to all the servers. It was way too complicated and expensive to get a unique certificate for every system. But now certificate lifetimes are shrinking to 47 days by 2029 and it’s not going to work anymore. You need to automate your certificates. Soon.

How the ACME protocol automates certificate issuance

In 2015, only about 40% of websites used HTTPS. Today HTTPS is used over 95% of the time. The ACME protocol made that shift possible. The Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol enables software to automatically prove domain control to a certificate authority without any human involvement. No more generating CSRs by hand. No more copy-pasting into web forms. No more waiting for validation emails. ACME largely solved certificate issuance.

Perfect Forward Secrecy Made Your Private Keys Boring

For twenty years, a stolen private key was a disaster. It meant total compromise. Every encrypted conversation, password transmitted, API call ever made was readable. Traffic was being recorded all the time, “just in case” your private key leaked out. The NSA even had a name for it: “harvest now, decrypt later.” Record all the encrypted traffic today. Steal the private keys tomorrow. Decrypt everything retroactively.