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This will be so much fun for people with legacy systems
Self signed certs about to get even more popular.
Self signed certs still have to abide. It’s the browser that checks it not the issuer. Now granted in most cases you already get a non trusted warning that most sysadmins skip…
The cert is what tells the browser how long it lasts, so I'm not sure how the browser can stop you from using a 10 year self signed cert or one from your own CA
Tony Stark was able to build his CA in a cave! With a bunch of dice!
This way it will gradually ramp up the pain tho. If they went straight to 47 days, basically the entire internet would be gone for a few days.
Are compromised private keys that much of a problem in the real world to merit such a pain in the ass, heavy handed "solution"? On paper, sure, it makes sense. In practice, you're forcing people to complicate the process by introducing, until now, unnecessary automation and introducing the possibility of brand new points of vulnerability.
I say this as someone who does maintain legacy systems (i.e. systems), so take it with a very angry, frazzled grain of salt. But I've done this for ~~years~~ decades and many, many systems and to my knowledge, I've never had a compromised private key.
This just seems like people who constantly lose their house keys mandating that everyone else change their locks as often as they do.
One issue is that browsers and other clients have a difficult time handling certificate revocation. Let's Encrypt is stopping support for OCSP, and that had a lot of privacy implications where a CA could tell who is going to what site, based on the requests to check certificate revocation. Let's Encrypt is moving to CRLs, but the size of the CRL is very large the more certificates you have. For Let's Encrypt with only a 90 day validity period, their CRL is smaller than a CA which has certificates as much as 398 days old.
The size of the CRL is something not only CAs have to manage, on the client side, you may have to check a 10MB file to see if the certificate for the site you're connecting to is still trusted by the CA. With many CAs, these CRLs will take up a lot of space on disk, and need to be updated often. Mozilla published a system called CRLite which uses Cascading Bloom Filters to keep track of revoked certificates in the browser, which will save a lot of space. Having a constrained set of revoked certificates is useful to ensure the bloomfilter won't be too large for the browser to store and manage.
I like that metaphor, I'm gonna save it. And agreed, there's going to be issues with legacy systems.
Luckily, at my current job, all of our outside-facing legacy services already go through an SSL terminating reverse proxy. And we then use self-signed certs with much longer validity for internal traffic where needed.
Doesn't really affet me much, as my LE cronjob will update the cert either way. Doesn't really matter if it's 90 days or 47 (what a weird number of days)
My little corner of the business has started migrating our certs to let's encrypt.
Hope it catches on else where
I can’t wait for the day when we have to refresh them hourly.
ephemeral single use certs when?
If I understand this correctly, it only affects certificates issued by public CAs (certificates for public websites, for example). So for certs issued by a company CA (e.g. for internal infrastructure), it should not apply. Can anyone confirm?
Digicert is such a shitty CA.
Oh, I agree. This change will affect all CAs however. And their post seemed to contain the most amount of information.
I just had to get it out of my system.
I like it. This action is inevitable in my opinion, and there will always be legacy systems regardless of the timeline, better start sooner than later.