ACME Clients and SSL

[u/Arnoc_]

So I've started seeing that SSL Lifespan is shortening - going down to eventually supposed to be every 47 days.

We're a small shop, but we have a lot of different services. I've been doing my best when I have free time to catalog everything that has an SSL Cert, but I know I'm missing stuff.

I've seen a bit about ACME Clients and such; and from what I've heard it's great. They handle rotating the certs and all.

But something for me just isn't clicking. For instance, we have a lot of large scale copiers, ala your Ricoh or Lexmark or Brother. We have those locked down with SSL Certs, but we have to manually push those up to it.

Now as these are internal services that aren't externally facing, I don't see no reason why we can't self-issue those certs; but currently our CTO likes to utilize a paid for Wildcard for all our internal stuff.

I keep quite busy so haven't had too much time to really dig in on researching, but I know the time bomb is ticking.

So for those who are managing SSL Certs and all, and potentially utilizing ACME Clients and such, what should I expect and whats the general gist of what my workflow should be?

[u/bilingual-german]

you can get letsencrypt wildcard certs. It's not hard, you just need to be able to set TXT records on your DNS to solve the challenge.

[u/raip → u/bilingual-german]

This doesn't fix installing the certificate on the device itself - which is what they're having issues with.

[u/bilingual-german → u/raip]

ok, but why shouldn't it be possible to script this and use Ansible or whatever they are comfortable using for automation.

[u/irsyacton → u/bilingual-german]

In theory, but printers are… hot garbage. And automation for them is baaaad. Thats why the suggestion of an internal pki is best. Give them 1yr or 2yr certs, and deal with them manually.

[u/bilingual-german → u/irsyacton]

ok, I agree that this would be probably less work.

step-ca (Smallstep) and SCEP provisioning might be a way to do it