this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days (letsencrypt.org)
submitted 6 months ago by artiman@piefed.social to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
196 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Let’s Encrypt will be reducing the validity period of the certificates we issue. We currently issue certificates valid for 90 days, which will be cut in half to 45 days by 2028.
This change is being made along with the rest of the industry, as required by the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements, which set the technical requirements that we must follow. All publicly-trusted Certificate Authorities like Let’s Encrypt will be making similar changes. Reducing how long certificates are valid for helps improve the security of the internet, by limiting the scope of compromise, and making certificate revocation technologies more efficient.

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[–] probable_possum@leminal.space 40 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

It's the "change your password often odyssey" 2.0. If it is safe, it is safe, it doesn't become unsafe after an arbitrary period of time (if the admin takes care and revokes compromised certs). If it is unsafe by design, the design flaw should be fixed, no?

Or am I missing the point?

[–] LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz 55 points 6 months ago (3 children)

The point is, if the certificate gets stolen, there's no GOOD mechanism for marking it bad.

If your password gets stolen, only two entities need to be told it's invalid. You and the website the password is for.

If an SSL certificate is stolen, everyone who would potentially use the website need to know, and they need to know before they try to contact the website. SSL certificate revocation is a very difficult communication problem, and it's mostly ignored by browsers because of the major performance issues it brings having to double check SSL certs with a third party.

[–] mbirth@lemmy.ml 20 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The point is, if the certificate gets stolen, there's no GOOD mechanism for marking it bad.

That’s what OCSP is for. Only Google isn’t playing along as per that wiki entry.

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I mean, are you intending to retroactively add SSL to every tool implementing SSL in the past few decades?…

Browsers aren’t the only thing that ingress SSL.

[–] mbirth@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 months ago

Then there’s the older way of checking CRLs which any tool of the past few decades should support.

[–] wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

That's what Carla are for.

[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

[–] wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

How did you reply to a deleted comment?

[–] bss03@infosec.pub 2 points 6 months ago

Probably the comment has federated to lemmy.world, but the deletion of the comment hasn't yet.

[–] bss03@infosec.pub 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Looks like autoincorrect did a s/CRLs/Carla/ for you.

[–] wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 months ago

And that somehow Lemmy didn't federate my deletion!

[–] Lyra_Lycan@lemmy.blahaj.zone -4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

But browsers have a marker for dangerous sites - surely Cloudflare, Amazon or Google should have a report system and deliver warnings at the base

[–] False@lemmy.world 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Browsers are only a (large) fraction of SSL traffic.

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

So is there an example of SSL certs being stolen and used nefariously. Only thing that sticks out to me is certificate authorities being bad.

[–] cron@feddit.org 31 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Short lifespans are also great when domains change their owner. With a 3 year lifespan, the old owner could possibly still read traffic for a few more years.

When the lifespan ist just 30-90 days, that risk is significatly reduced.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Only matters for LE certs.
You can still buy 1 year certs

[–] cron@feddit.org 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

For 3 more months or so, you can't buy them in april 2026 anymore

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

oh? Damn

[–] Zanathos@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago

They are going down to 200 day expiration in March 2026. You can still buy 5 year certificates today but you still need to reissue them in 365 day cadence.

[–] probable_possum@leminal.space 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Moot point!

You could still get certificates for other people's domains from Honest Ahmed 's used cars and totally trustworthy CA or so. But that's another story. (there are A LOT of trusted CAs in everybody OS and browser. Do you know and trust them all?)

[–] cron@feddit.org 2 points 6 months ago

The maintainers of the big web browsers have pretty strict rules for CAs in this list. If any one of them gets caught issuing only one certificate maliciously, they are out of business.

And all CAs are required to publish each certificate in multiple public, cryptographically signed ledgers.

Sure, there is a history of CAs issuing certificates to people that shouldn't have them (e.g. for espionage), but that is almost impossible now.