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Posted by piskov 6 days ago

Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage in any US sanctioned territory [pdf](letsencrypt.org)
454 points | 382 commentspage 5
Dibby053 5 days ago|
All they can do is disable support for certain ccTLDs, but other than that, it's unenforceable.

That's why many tech companies echo these laws overtly and with a lot of fanfare... They know they have no real control over who uses their services, so this is a way to signal their good faith and best effort in advance, in case they end up caught up in some foreign cyberbullshit.

cekanoni 5 days ago||
this is big blow to the Internet society very disappointing to read this..
markhahn 5 days ago||
huh? the linked document shows that bullet item as deleted.
phoe-krk 5 days ago||
And now imagine that one of the Trump tantrums contains an announcement of sanctions against the European Union.
marcosdumay 5 days ago|
He already announced sanctions against Spain. And took them back when Germany announced that sanctions against one EU country meant sanctions against them all.
jalospinoso 5 days ago||
The uninteresting version of this is “US entity follows US law.”

The interesting version is that Web PKI is not just cryptographic infrastructure. It is also a policy distribution system. A browser trust store, a CA, a subscriber agreement, revocation rules, export controls, and sanctions law all end up in the request path of "can this site speak HTTPS to normal users?"

That does not make Let’s Encrypt uniquely bad. Any CA has some jurisdiction, owners, contracts, root-program obligations, abuse process, and legal exposure. Moving the CA changes the governance surface; it does not remove governance.

But it does mean "just use Let’s Encrypt" is not a neutral answer when protocols, browsers, APIs, app stores, or regulators effectively require TLS. The operational dependency is not only ACME uptime and certificate issuance. It is also jurisdictional continuity.

The hard product question is what failure mode we want:

1. Web PKI: power concentrates in CAs, browsers, and root programs. 2. DANE/DNSSEC: power shifts toward DNS operators, registries, registrars, and governments. 3. Self-signed / TOFU / pinning: power shifts toward application-specific trust and worse UX. 4. Multiple CAs: better resilience, but still bounded by browser trust stores and legal chokepoints.

There is no apolitical trust system here. There are only different control planes with different failure modes.

The practical ask from Let’s Encrypt should be clarity: issuance vs renewal vs revocation, existing certs vs future certs, domain location vs subscriber location, hosting location vs user location, and how they interpret “use” of a certificate. Without that, operators are left guessing whether this is a narrow compliance clause or a broad infrastructure-risk event.

snowflaxxx 5 days ago||
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misano 5 days ago||
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psy0p 5 days ago||
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mollydzy 5 days ago||
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mollydzy 5 days ago|
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