A junior Linux administrator is configuring a new public-facing web server and suggests using a self-signed SSL/TLS certificate to enable HTTPS, arguing it is free and provides encryption. As the senior administrator, what is the primary security risk you should explain to them regarding this approach?
The certificate cannot be automatically renewed, requiring manual intervention and increasing the risk of expiration.
The certificate is not signed by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA), which prevents clients from verifying the server's identity and makes man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks much easier.
Self-signed certificates inherently use weaker cryptographic algorithms than those issued by a commercial CA.
Modern web servers like Nginx and Apache do not support the use of self-signed certificates for enabling HTTPS.
The correct answer is that self-signed certificates are not signed by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA), so clients like web browsers cannot automatically validate the server's identity. This forces users to manually bypass security warnings, which trains them to ignore these critical alerts. This behavior makes them vulnerable to man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, where an attacker can present their own fraudulent certificate, intercepting and decrypting traffic without the user's knowledge. The other options are incorrect. The encryption strength of a certificate is determined by the key size and algorithm used during its creation, not by whether it is self-signed or CA-signed. Self-signed certificates are fully compatible with major web servers like Apache and Nginx. While they lack a revocation mechanism like those offered by CAs, and this is a security risk, the most immediate and fundamental problem for a public-facing site is the lack of a verifiable trust chain.
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