Private CAs for Internal Certs

Cluster focuses on recommendations to use private or self-signed Certificate Authorities for internal servers and domains, as alternatives to public CAs like Let's Encrypt which don't support non-public domains.

➡️ Stable 0.7x Security
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#6077
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Keywords

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Sample Comments

50CNT Mar 21, 2017 View on HN

Couldn't you just set up a Private CA since you'd have to customize things anyways?

justin_oaks Oct 31, 2022 View on HN

Using an external service as a way of setting up internal-only certificates? No thanks.

jamespo May 16, 2025 View on HN

I don't see why anyone wouldn't issue certificates from a private CA for this use case.

redsavagefiero Mar 11, 2019 View on HN

Self signed internal CA for private use all day + mandatory client certs. Internal approved CA for business. Never see a need to change this. This Lets encrypt stuff is faddish to me.

cpach Nov 13, 2013 View on HN

You can solve this by setting up your own Certificate Authority.

swiley May 13, 2020 View on HN

You could run your own CA if everyone trusts you. Or you could set up DNS which is probably a better idea.

forgottenpass Jan 14, 2019 View on HN

Any reason you can't get a cert for those machines as if they were going to be https hosts, and use that?

simias Jul 6, 2017 View on HN

Pre-LE you'd use an other authority that provided wildcard certificates. That's what they're for after all, why would you want to hack your way around them?

pests Mar 10, 2022 View on HN

You can use a public CA like LetsEncrypt then. Exposes you to the certificate log but you should be secured already anyways. Just have to use the DNS challenge (unless you wanna poke a hole for certbot) to grab it

voiper1 Sep 15, 2021 View on HN

Is there a reason they didn't just use a wildcard certificate - wouldn't that make this so much simpler?