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We've Issued Our First IP Address Certificate

Since Let’s Encrypt started issuing certificates in 2015, people have repeatedly requested the ability to get certificates for IP addresses, an option that only a few certificate authorities have offered. Until now, they’ve had to look elsewhere, because we haven’t provided that feature. Today, we’ve issued our first certificate for an IP address, as we announced we would in January. As with other new certificate features on our engineering roadmap, we’ll now start gradually rolling out this option to more and more of our subscribers.

Because we overwhelmingly tend to think and talk about Internet services in terms of domain names, those are the identifiers that are normally listed in certificates like those that Let’s Encrypt provides to our subscribers. If you’re hosting something in your house on a residential broadband connection, your Internet service provider most likely doesn’t guarantee that your IP address will stay the same over time. If your client software requests an IP address cert with details that aren’t compatible with these policies, the order will be rejected by the ACME server.

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