HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
kristapsdz
acme-client-portable
C2017–2019
kristapsdz / acme-client-portable · Archived

acme-client-portable

portable version of acme-client, a secure ACME client

Security & Privacy
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
6Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
101GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

portable version of acme-client, a secure ACME client

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month6 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-02-01 05:40:27 UTC to 2019-02-12 04:51:31 UTC.

012342017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 3 submissions, 1 commentsFeb 20172017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsFeb 20182018-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsFeb 2019

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Feb 20172017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC431
Mar 20172017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20172017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20172017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20172017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20172017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20172017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20172017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20172017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20172017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20172017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20182018-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20182018-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20182018-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20182018-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20182018-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20182018-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-08-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Aug 20182018-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20182018-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20182018-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20182018-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20182018-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20192019-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-03-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

6 sources
anjbe·Feb 12, 2019
> My question is that the README implies that pledge() and unveil() are required for functionality, to the point that porting to an OS without support for that is an inherently questionable idea. Knowing Kristaps, he probably considers strong privsep and privdrop basic functionality. That is after all why he developed acme-client in the first place; he acknowledged at the time the plethora of “lightweight” certbot alternatives but was more concerned with security architecture. > That certainly isn't true of Chrome (I run it on non-OpenBSD and there are no functionality / security issues in doing so). That isn't true of OpenSSH, which also supports pledge() on OpenBSD and still is pretty secure on other OSes. Chrome uses different techniques depending on the platform. On OpenBSD it uses pledge() and unveil(), while on Linux it uses seccomp
Read the rest
. Kristaps isn’t a fan of seccomp’s complexity, as he mentions in the readme: “Linux's security facilities are a mess, and will take an expert hand to properly secure.” He’s not suggesting it can’t be done, and the Google Chrome team in particular has the kind of expertise he’s talking about. For projects of less‐than‐Chrome scale, though, Kristaps feels that seccomp is too difficult: https://github.com/kristapsdz/acme-client-portable/blob/mast... > And I am worried, in particular, that the author means that the validator is not very strong, and the bulk of the validation is that it unveils the filesystem to the files it's supposed to write to and then blindly trusts the input, on the grounds that the remote side could just have sent different files. I don’t understand this interpretation. It’s not what I got from the readme at all. What kind of validation do you expect Kristaps to be overlooking?
In Openrsync imported into the tree
aexaey·Feb 2, 2017
OP is understandably upset about seccomp filters not being portable between different distributions and architectures. Fair enough. But there's another glaring issue here. This app's seccom filter was written by a fairly security-conscious developer, who goes as far as saying he'd ideally want to reproduce any bug reports involving filter changes, and have serious unease accepting patches with new "allow" statements blindly. In other words, we can consider this seccomp filter to be as good as it gets, or close. And yet, this filter allows[1]: - Full network access (socket/connect/bind/recvfrom/sendto); - Full local file-system access (open/read/write/close/mmap/unlink/rename); - Access to a long-time vulnerable system call that was only fixed relatively recently, i.e. probably fix still isn't applied on quite a number of systems out there
Read the rest
(madvise) [2]. That's plenty of rope, if you ask me. How one could argue that process having all of permissions above is "sandboxed" in any meaningful way? [1] https://github.com/kristapsdz/acme-client-portable/blob/mast... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12756006
In Why acme-client-portable (Lets's Encrypt client) doesn't enable seccomp on Linux

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.