Is it possible to issue certificate for IP address?

Issuance Tech
3

This is something I've looked into a lot

There are no good free options for IP certificates

There are no good cheap options for IP certificates

Can it be done for the right price? Yes, look at https://1.1.1.1/ or https://8.8.8.8/ (which is just a redirect but it DOES have a valid certificate), or, on the IPv6 side https://[2606:4700:4700::1001]/

as far as I know, there is exactly one free option, ZeroSSL, and it has many caveats:

  1. Only IPv4, because, as per their customer service, they haven't gotten around to updating their system yet

  2. Not available via their ACME service, only available through the website, or using their API

  3. You can only get 3 free 3-month certificates per account. That means you can get at most 9 months of life out of each account, and that's if you renew on the very last day

I will say that the account creation process is fairly quick & easy, and their API isn't too painful to work with.

https://zerossl.com/ if you want to check them out

also, I will say, if you're just trying to catch stray traffic and redirect it to your hostname... yes, you probably do see some traffic hitting your web server with no "Host:" header, or with the "Host:" header set to your IP address... but those aren't humans. They're bots & security scanners & stuff. They probably don't even check certificate validity. So whether they follow your redirect or not is probably not going to be affected by whether or not you have a valid certificate for your IP address. Valid IP certificates are actually very rare in the wild, so unless you have some very obscure use case you'll probably be fine without one.

8 Likes