Lame. 45 days? 10 days for DCV? How common are exploits involving old certificates anyway? And automated cert management is just another exploit target. Do they seriously think an attacker who pwns a server can’t keep the automatic renewals running?
The solution, according to Sectigo’s Chief Compliance Officer Tim Callan, is to automate certificate management — unsurprising considering the firm sells software that does just this.
Any post/article with the word “slammed” in it gets a downvote and a no-read from me. That word needs to disappear from journalism/forums/life/etc.
This is the one case where I’d make an exception. I read through the threads, it got particularly heated.
As someone who creates custom domain name applications, FUCK THEM WITH A PINEAPPLE SPIKY SIDE FIRST. This problem is on par with timezones for needless complexity and communication disasters. Companys and advertisers are now adding man in the middle certs for additional data collection/visibility. If the ciphers not cracked, changing the certs exposes significantly more failure, than letting one get a little stale.
Sysadmin used slam! It’s super effective!Why not just autorenew on a schedule?
I use Lets Encrypt, and my certs get renewed automatically without me thinking about it.
Mostly customer provided certs, high end clients make all kinds of stupid requests like the aforementioned man-in-the-middle chain sniffers, clients that refuse DNS validation, clients that require alternate domains to be updated regularly. Management is fine for mywebsite.com, but how are you solving an EV on the spoofed root prod domain, with an sso cert chain for lower environments on internal traffic that is originally provided by a client? And do you want the cs reps emailing each other your root cert and (mistakingly) the key? I’ve been given since SCARY keys by clueless support engineers. I don’t want to do this every 3 months.
Sounds like a change in company policy, because AFAIK, there’s no good reason for pretty much any of that.
Sounds like you don’t do contact negotiations, if someone will pay 2 million to appear on their root domain, you’ll sit down and figure it out for a couple hours.
Yes, I don’t, and I would honestly like to understand what use-case these customers are trying to solve. Because there’s a very good chance that they can get their preferred outcomes with a lot less manual work.
Unrelated to the topic, but I deal with a database storing timestamps.
In local time.
For systems all around the world.
You’ll see current entries timestamped 12:28 from eastern Europe followed by ones 6:28 from America and then another 11:28 from central Europe.
Without offset.
Ew. Just store UTC timestamps and do optional translation on the client using whatever the client sets up for their timezone. It’s not hard…
Oh believe me, I would change some things about that database if I could. Alas, I’m just the analyst building data models from it.
(To be fair, it’s otherwise easy to work with and for most use-cases, it doesn’t matter since they’re aggregated per month anyway, so I just load the last month’s data on the 2nd of each month. I definitely have worse patients to operate on.)
The Register is deliberately tabloid-like in style (right up to the “red top” site banner), but is good quality (at least when I read it).
They won’t write an article about science without using the word “boffins” either. It’s just their thing.
If approved, it will affect all Safari certificates, which follows a similar push by Google, that plans to reduce the max-validity period on Chrome for these digital trust files down to 90 days.
Max lifespans of certs have been gradually decreasing over the years in an ongoing effort to boost internet security. Prior to 2011, they could last up to about eight years. As of 2020, it’s about 13 months.
Apple’s proposal would shorten the max certificate lifespan to 200 days after September 2025, then down to 100 days a year later and 45 days after April 2027. The ballot measure also reduces domain control validation (DCV), phasing that down to 10 days after September 2027.
And while it’s generally agreed that shorter lifespans improve internet security overall — longer certificate terms mean criminals have more time to exploit vulnerabilities and old website certificates — the burden of managing these expired certs will fall squarely on the shoulders of systems administrators.
Over the past couple of days, these unsung heroes who keep the internet up and running flocked to Reddit to bemoan their soon-to-be increasing workload. As one noted, while the proposal “may not pass the CABF ballot, but then Google or Apple will just make it policy anyway…”
…
However, as another sysadmin pointed out, automation isn’t always the answer. “I’ve got network appliances that require SSL certs and can’t be automated,” they wrote. “Some of them work with systems that only support public CAs.”
Another added: “This is somewhat nightmarish. I have about 20 appliance like services that have no support for automation. Almost everything in my environment is automated to the extent that is practical. SSL renewal is the lone achilles heel that I have to deal with once every 365 days.”
Until next year, anyway.
Automated certificate lifecycle management is going to be the norm for businesses moving forward.
This seems counter-intuitive to the goal of “improving internet security”. Automation is a double-edged sword. Convenient, sure, but also an attack vector, one where malicious activity is less likely to be noticed, because actual people aren’t involved in tbe process, anymore.
We’ve got ample evidence of this kinda thing with passwords: increasing complexity requirements and lifetime requirements improves security, only up to a point. Push it too far, and it actually ends up DECREASING security, because it encourages bad practices to get around the increased burden of implementation.
Smells like Apple knows something but can’t say anything. What reason would they want lifespans cut so short other than they know of an attack vector that means more than 10 days isn’t safe?
AFAIK they’re not a CA that sells certs so this can’t be some money making scheme. And they’ll be very aware how unpopular 10 day lifespans would be to services that suck and require manual download and upload every time you renew.
Smells like you didn’t read the article, it’s an ongoing trend:
Max lifespans of certs have been gradually decreasing over the years in an ongoing effort to boost internet security. Prior to 2011, they could last up to about eight years. As of 2020, it’s about 13 months.
Reducing it to one year made sense, one year down to 10 days is actually a fucking massive difference. Practically speaking, it’s a far, far bigger change than 8 years down to 1.
This isn’t just an “ongoing trend” at this point, it would be a fundamental change to the way that certificates are managed i.e. making it impossible to handle renewals manually for any decently sized business.
They never said the ongoing trend wasn’t logarithmic. By 2030 you’ll be updating certs 6-8 times a day! Please drink verification can.
Thank you for the smug response however I did indeed read the article and going from 13 months to 10 days is not a trend but a complete rearchitecture of how certificates are managed.
You have no idea how many orgs have to do this manually as their systems won’t enable it to be automated. Following a KBA once a year is fine for most (yet they still forget and websites break for a few days; this literally happened to NVD of all things a few weeks ago).
This change is a 36x increase in effort with no consideration for those who can’t renew and apply certs programmatically / through automation.
This change is a 36x increase in effort with no consideration for those who can’t renew and apply certs programmatically / through automation
Don’t worry. All that old gear is at least 45 days old - so old - and isn’t an apple product anyway probably. Ergo, support isn’t their issue and you will have to take that up with your OEM because la-la-la-laaaaa, can’t hear you. Wanna go ride bikes?
I did indeed read the article
Smells like Apple knows something but can’t say anything.
Then do explain your conspiracy theory. Sectigo could go for a money grab, otherwise… probably just forcing automation without thinking of impact, as usual.
Just going to mention my zero-dependency ACME (Let’s Encrypt) library: https://github.com/clshortfuse/acmejs
It runs on Chrome, Safari, FireFox, Deno, and NodeJS.
I use it to spin up my wildcard and HTTP certificates. I’ve personally automated it by having the certificate upload to S3 buckets and AWS Certificates. I wrote a helper for Name.com for DNS validation. For HTTP validation, I use HTTP PUT.
Why have this run in the browser? Why not just have it run on the server and renew in the background?
That’s what NodeJS and Deno are.
The point of the browser support means it runs on modern Web technologies and doesn’t need external binaries (eg: OpenSSL). It can literally run on any JS, even a browser.
I’m aware, but you led with Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, so it sounded like browser support was the point, so I was curious what the use-case was.
That’s still cool though. I personally would’ve just use Python, since that’s generally available everywhere I’d want to run something like this (though Python’s built-in HTTP lib isn’t nearly as nice as JS’s
fetch(), I’d wantrequests).I have just dumped code into a Chrome console and saved a cert while in a pinch. It’s not best practices of course, but when you need something fast for one-time use, it’s nice to have something immediately available.
You could make your own webpage that works in the browser (no backend) and make a cert. I haven’t published anything publicly because you really shouldn’t dump private keys in unknown websites, but nothing is stopping you from making your own.
Any machine I’m on has Python installed, so that’s my go-to.
time to shine for DANE (actually no since the world sucks)
Slams!
In this case slams means “slightly irritated by”
Sounds like free money for all those certificate authorities out there. Imma start my own CA with blackjack and hookers.
Or… They do what they did last time the lifetime was cut down from 3-10 years down to 395 days… Just issue you a new certificate when the old one runs out and up to whatever the time period you bought it for…?
Let’s Encrypt isn’t the only CA to use ACME, you can auto renew with basically any CA that implemented it (spoiler: most of them have)
