Arstechnica reports
In July of 2017, the nonprofit certificate authority Let's Encrypt promised to deliver something that would put secure websites and Web applications within reach of any Internet user: free "wildcard" certificates to enable secure HTTP connections for entire domains. Today, Let's Encrypt took that promised service live, in addition to a new version of the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol, an interface that can be used by a variety of client software packages to automate verification of certificate requests.
[....]Many hosting providers already support the registration of Let's Encrypt certificates to varying degrees. But Let's Encrypt's free certificate offering hasn't been snapped up by some larger hosting providers—such as GoDaddy—who also sell SSL certificates to their customers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @10:08AM
There's several ways to automate each of those scenarios. Some of them depend on some extra pieces, but nothing onerous.
If they're not internet-accessible names, no public CA should be issuing certificates for them, so we're not concerned in the slightest about certificates for internal names. The devices themselves don't have to be internet accessible to have certificates generated, signed and deployed via some sort of NMS or central automation, or to reach out individually to verify via external DNS zone management APIs. In Cisco-land, you only want certs on edge devices (ASAs, Ironports, etc) or VPN endpoints and the like, baby ISRs and bigger can probably do it all themselves with EEM and TCL, but I've not really looked for options there, best to handle it in the management platform. Anything appliance-y is going to need central management.
A "managed" network switch with only a web interface and which doesn't offer an NMS-accessible API could be an issue. If someone didn't want to click past the certificate warning on that device, they should've considered buying a proper managed switch. I've yet to see anyone with a cheapo "websmart"-type switch even notice the issue or regard it as a problem.