This letter was originally published in our 2024 Annual Report.
The past year at ISRG has been a great one and I couldn’t be more proud of our staff, community, funders, and other partners that made it happen. Let’s Encrypt continues to thrive, serving more websites around the world than ever before...
I'm saying that if you're a developer of software that communicates between two nodes across the internet, you shouldn't rely on X.509 because the common root stores have historically been filled with compromised CAs, which would let someone with that CA decrypt and view the messages you send with TLS.
You should mint your own certs and pin their fingerprints so that your application will only send messages if the fingerprint of the cert on the other end matches your trusted cert.
Technically all certificates are pinned, especially with public CAs, most OS package the latest CA certs which will all go out of style within 10 years or so. You can see this by loading up any old distro or defunct version of windows.
Yeah, fuck the users. We can just slap "100% secure" on the box and who cares if some woman is raped and murdered because we decided not to follow best security practices, right? /s