What is a recognized weakness of self-signed certificates?

Self-signed certificates are often used for securing communications, especially in development and internal environments. However, a recognized weakness of self-signed certificates is that they typically lack trust from external entities. Unlike certificates issued by trusted Certificate Authorities (CAs), which are widely recognized by browsers and operating systems, self-signed certificates are not automatically trusted by these systems. This means that any entity that encounters a self-signed certificate will not inherently trust it and will often present warnings to users about the potential security risks, requiring manual intervention to accept the certificate.

In situations where a system expects a certain level of trustworthiness, such as in public-facing applications or when conducting business transactions, self-signed certificates can create significant vulnerabilities due to this lack of trust. This is important for ensuring secure communications, as users need to feel confident that the endpoints they are connecting to are reliable and secure. Thus, while self-signed certificates may be easy and quick to create for internal use, their absence of external trust limits their applicability in broader scenarios.