Who benefits from this? Even though Let’s Encrypt stresses that most site operators will do fine sticking with ordinary domain certificates, there are still scenarios where a numeric identifier is the only practical choice:

Infrastructure services such as DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) – where clients may pin a literal IP address for performance or censorship-evasion reasons.
IoT and home-lab devices – think network-attached storage boxes, for example, living behind static WAN addresses.
Ephemeral cloud workloads – short-lived back-end servers that spin up with public IPs faster than DNS records can propagate.
    • SteveTech@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      7 hours ago

      With dynamic DNS? Yeah it always has, as long as you can host a http server.

      With a dynamic IP? It should do, the certs are only valid for 6 days for that reason.

  • AliasVortex@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    44
    ·
    14 hours ago

    That’s kind of awesome! I have a bunch of home lab stuff, but have been putting off buying a domain (I was a broke college student when I started my lab and half the point was avoiding recurring costs- plus I already run the DNS, as far as the WAN is concerned, I have whatever domain I want). My loose plan was to stand up a certificate authority and push the root public key out with active directory, but being able to certify things against Let’s Encrypt might make things significantly easier.

    • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      7 hours ago

      I use a domain, but for homelab I eventually switched to my own internal CA.

      Instead of having to do service.domain.tld it’s nice to do service.lan.

    • oasis@piefed.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      13 hours ago

      Setting up a root and a immediate CA is significantly more fun though ;) It’s also teaches you more about PKI which is a good skill to have.

    • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      10 hours ago

      I don’t see how? Normal HTTP/TLS validation would still apply so you’d need port forwarding. You can’t host anything on the CGNAT IP so you can’t pass validation and they won’t issue you a cert.

        • deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 hour ago

          You don’t get control of the incoming port that way. For LetsEncrypt to issue a certificate primarily intended for HTTPS, they will check that the HTTP server on that IP is owned by the requesting party. That has to live on port 80, which you can’t forward on CGNAT.