KeyChest Blog

Let’s Encrypt automates certificate renewals. It sells the idea that you install a client and don’t have to think about it again. This requires reliability that has to start with Let’s Encrypt itself. We can now see that with KeyChest.

Apple believes that SSL/HTTPS certificates valid for more than a year are not secure enough. As such the Safari browser will not be trusting certs valid for more than 13 months. Change comes on September 1. What does it mean?

While KEYCHEST as a brand started as a straightforward expiry management service for Let's Encrypt, it has become a service with a rich set of features and there is still several technologies that wait for production deployment.

KeyChest is about keeping your business up and running by preventing the expiry of important web services - this is our goal. While it may be prudent to reach A+ rating in specialised audit tools (like SSL Labs), it will not prevent your business downtime 3 months later when your super secure ordering service expires.

Let’s Encrypt has a number of downsides when used on a large scale. It uses modern key management protocols, but the high-level of automation requires management. This is what KeyChest provides.

KeyChest's business model is based on the management of HTTPS expiry. Automation of certificate issuance is for us an additional service that moves it closer to a complete service to manage your internal and external certificates. What it means in practical terms is that we simply pass on our cost of certificates to all paying users of KeyChest.

KeyChest has started as an easy to use HTTPS monitoring service. What we are aiming for is a general purpose key management service, which can look after your public as well as internal web encryption keys.

Those who have been with us for a while may know that we change the cloud provider to Digital Ocean in January. At the same time, we started experimenting with HA database cluster. And we learnt a lot.

Letsencrypt is now installed on more than 50% of all webservers. This is mostly thanks to its adoption by many web hosting providers. We can also see it starts being used by large companies and enterprises. But what are the downsides?

Having spent quite a few months working on the "invisible" code powering KeyChest, we have added two new reports - phishing threat and identity reports. But that is not all, we will finally add agents for monitoring internal networks.