this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Explain Like I'm Five

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Why are CAs important if anyone can get their certificate signed for free? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by lemmington_steele@lemmy.world to c/explainlikeimfive@lemmy.world
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For example, anyone could use Let's Encrypt to get a trusted certificate, so what makes this trustworthy? Or why not trust everyone that signs their own certificates with a program like OpenSSL?

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[โ€“] Varen@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

the Cert just confirms, that the domain your accessing is belonging to who owns it. When you signup for a cert at LetsEncrypt, you have to run a script on the source, which confirms as your domain.
You wouldn't be able to get a Cert for e.g. amazon.com - because you wouldn't be able to run that specific script on the source and so LetsEncrypt couldn't confirm if that domain really is yours or not. And that's as well the reason, why not trust everyone,

[โ€“] lemmington_steele@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

perfect! thank you :)