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?