hakwerk/labca

A private Certificate Authority for internal (lab) use, based on the open source ACME Automated Certificate Management Environment implementation from Let's Encrypt (tm).

More and more websites and applications are served over HTTPS, where all traffic between your browser and the web server is encrypted. With standard HTTP the (form) data is unencrypted and open to eavesdroppers and hackers listening to communications between the user and the website. Therefore the Chrome browser now even warns about unsafe plain HTTP sites to nudge users towards HTTPS.

To a lesser extent this also applies to internal applications and sites that are not exposed publicly. Just because the users may have a higher level of trust versus users of a public facing website doesn't mean sensitive content shouldn't be protected as much as possible. Lots of hacking and theft occur from within a company's own walls, virtual or real. Also, no user should get used to ignoring any browser warnings (e.g. about self-signed certificates), even for internal sites.

no user should get used to ignoring any browser warnings

For the public internet, Let's Encrypt™ has made a big impact by providing free HTTPS certificates in an easy and automated way. There are many clients available to interact with their so called ACME (Automated Certificate Management Environment). They also have a staging environment that allows you to get things right before issuing trusted certificates and reduce the chance of your running up against rate limits.