(Note: This post is also cross-posted on the Let's Encrypt blog)

As announced earlier this year, Let's Encrypt now issues IP address and six-day certificates to the general public. The Certbot team here at the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been working on two improvements to support these features: the --preferred-profile flag released last year in Certbot 4.0, and the --ip-address flag, new in Certbot 5.3. With these improvements together, you can now use Certbot to get those IP address certificates!

If you want to try getting an IP address certificate using Certbot, install version 5.4 or higher (for webroot support with IP addresses), and run this command:

sudo certbot certonly --staging \
  --preferred-profile shortlived \
  --webroot \
  --webroot-path <filesystem path to webserver root> \
  --ip-address <your ip address>

Two things of note:

• This will request a non-trusted certificate from the Let's Encrypt staging server. Once you've got things working the way you want, run without the --staging flag to get a publicly trusted certificate.
• This requests a certificate with Let's Encrypt's "shortlived" profile, which will be good for 6 days. This is a Let's Encrypt requirement for IP address certificates.

As of right now, Certbot only supports getting IP address certificates, not yet installing them in your web server. There's work to come on that front. In the meantime, edit your webserver configuration to load the newly issued certificate from /etc/letsencrypt/live/<ip address>/fullchain.pem and /etc/letsencrypt/live/<ip address>/privkey.pem.

The command line above uses Certbot's "webroot" mode, which places a challenge response file in a location where your already-running webserver can serve it. This is nice since you don't have to temporarily take down your server.

There are two other plugins that support IP address certificates today: --manual and --standalone. The manual plugin is like webroot, except Certbot pauses while you place the challenge response file manually (or runs a user-provided hook to place the file). The standalone plugin runs a simple web server that serves a challenge response. It has the advantage of being very easy to configure, but has the disadvantage that any running webserver on port 80 has to be temporarily taken down so Certbot can listen on that port. The nginx and apache plugins don't yet support IP addresses.

You should also be sure that Certbot is set up for automatic renewal. Most installation methods for Certbot set up automatic renewal for you. However, since the webserver-specific installers don't yet support IP address certificates, you'll have to set a --deploy-hook that tells your webserver to load the most up-to-date certificates from disk. You can provide this --deploy-hook through the certbot reconfigure command using the rest of the flags above.

We hope you enjoy using IP address certificates with Let's Encrypt and Certbot, and as always if you get stuck you can ask for help in the Let's Encrypt Community Forum.

Phishing and data breaches are a constant on the internet. The single best defense against both is to use a password manager to generate and automatically fill a unique password for every site. While 1Password has recently raised their prices, and researchers have recently published potential flaws in some implementations, using a password manager is still a critical investment in keeping yourself safe on the internet. There are free options, and even ones built into your operating system or browser. We can help you choose.

Password managers protect you from phishing by memorizing the connection between a password and a website, and, if you use the browser integration, filling each password only on the website it belongs to. They protect you from data breaches by making it feasible to use a long, random, unique password on each site. When bad actors get their hands on a data breach that includes email addresses and password data, they will typically try to crack those passwords, and then attempt to login on dozens of different websites with the email address/password combinations from the breach. If you use the same password everywhere, this can turn one site’s data breach into a personal disaster, as many of your accounts get compromised at once.

In recent years, the built-in password managers in browsers and operating systems have come a long way but still stumble on cross-platform support. Within the Apple ecosystem, you can use iCloud Keychain, with support for generating passwords, autofill in Safari, and end-to-end encrypted synchronization, so long as you don’t need access to your passwords in Google Chrome or Android (Windows is supported, though). Within the Google ecosystem, you can use Google Password Manager, which also supports password generation, autofill, and sync. Crucially, though, Google Password manager does not end-to-end encrypt credentials ​​unless you manually enable on-device encryption. Firefox and Microsoft also offer password managers. All of these platform-based options are free, and may already be on your devices. But they tend to lock you into a single-vendor world.

There are also a variety of third-party password managers, some paid, and some free, and some open source. Most of these have the advantage of letting you sync your passwords across a wide variety of devices, operating systems, and browsers. Here are four key things to look out for. First, when synchronizing between devices, your passwords should be encrypted end-to-end using a password that only you know (a “master” or “primary” password). Second, support for autofill can reduce the chance that you’ll get phished. Third, security audits performed by third parties can increase confidence that the software really does what it is designed to do. And finally, of course, random generation of unique passwords is a must.

Don’t let uncertainty or price increases dissuade you from using a password manager. There’s a good choice for everyone, and using one can make your online life a lot safer. Want more help choosing? Check out our Surveillance Self-Defense guide.