The most-aggressively short timelines don’t apply until 2029. Regardless, now is the time to get serious about automation. That is going to require vendors of a lot of off-the-shelf products to come up with better (or any) automation integrations for existing cert management systems or whatever the new standard becomes.
The current workflow many big orgs use is something like:
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Poor bastard application engineer/support guy is forced to keep a spreadsheet for all the machines and URLs he “owns” and set 30-day reminders when they will expire,
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manually generate CSRs,
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reach out to some internal or 3rd party group who may ignore his request or fuck it up twice before giving him correct signed certs,
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schedule and get approval for one or more “possible brief outage” maintenance windows because the software requires manually rebinding the new certs in some archaic way involving handjamming each cert into a web interface on a separate Windows box.
As the validity period shrinks and the number of environments the average production application uses grows, the concept of doing these processes manually becomes a total clusterfuck.
Can confirm, am poor bastard.
Can you not write a script to automate a lot of this?
I’m that poor bastard engineer at my company. This likely will be the push we need to prioritize automation. Dealing with manual renewals with Digicert has been a pain in the ass. If anyone has experience with their automated option I’d love to hear it.
Ironically the shortening of cert lengths has pushed me to automated systems and away from the traditional paid trust providers.
I used to roll a 1-year cert for my CDN, and manually buy renewals and go through the process of signing and uploading the new ones, it wasn’t particularly onerous, but then they moved to I think either 3 or 6 months max signing, which was the point where I just automated it with Let’s Encrypt.I’m in general not a fan of how we do root of trust on the web, I much prefer had DANE caught on, where I can pin a cert at the DNS level that is secured with DNSSEC and is trusted through IANA and the root zone.
I’ve proposed using Let’s Encrypt but my coworkers believe there would be a perception issue with us using a “free” TLS certificate provider. I work for a popular internet search engine so it’s a reasonable worry.
It just seems like LE has the most efficient automatic renewal setup, though I haven’t looked in detail at other providers.
Looking forward to companies hiring “Cert Engineers” who just renew certs all day.
Joking aside, it really is time to deploy automation for those that haven’t already
That was a joke? Nice try Nostradamus, I know you can see the future.
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Why 47 Days? 47 days might seem like an arbitrary number, but it’s a simple cascade:
200 days = 6 maximal month (184 days) + 1/2 30-day month (15 days) + 1 day wiggle room 100 days = 3 maximal month (92 days) + ~1/4 30-day month (7 days) + 1 day wiggle room 47 days = 1 maximal month (31 days) + 1/2 30-day month (15 days) + 1 day wiggle room
Or just “1.5 months”.
If it was 46 days, there will (arguably) be times where it’s less than 1.5 months.
I guess the intention is automation that updates every month, leaving you with half a month to fix issues.
This seems sensible.
My concern is basically that this forces people to use very expensive cert providers, since it is infeasible to setup and connect and secure an HSM that can do this yourself. And Microsoft and Amazon have tricked the browser forums that their online ones are good enough.
It essentially puts yet another monopoly into the “open” Web. The CA browser forum is a joke at this point and I don’t respect any of the decision in the last 10 years. They all serve to further centralize and close off the web.
People keep bringing up LetsEncrypt, but it very much cannot issue EV carts. It costs THOUSANDS of dollars to use a service that can auto renew “trusted certs”.
Why do you need EV certs?
Get ready for a bunch more 1 and 2 day outages because someone forgot/missed the deadline to renew some crusty server somewhere. This is such massive overkill for most servers. End users should start getting used to that expired certificate warning in their browser of choice and the process to tell it to continue to the site anyway.
End users should start getting used to that expired certificate warning in their browser of choice and the process to tell it to continue to the site anyway.
We already have a lot of this, and it’s definitely gonna get worse. Is a security dance so convoluted that people are used to others just messing up really an effective process?
Given the biggest breaches were caused by default passwords and misconfigured S3 outhouses, are we focusing on the right stuff today?
Can we stop doing certs now?
Can we stop letting google decide what is and isn’t acceptable on the internet based on who gave them money?
So how do we do trust if we don’t have specific people to trust to issue trust
Just go to the website.
What… Website???
The one you want to go to
How do I know it’s the website I want to go to and not a fake website
I don’t care?
There’s a whole internet out there that is disallowed from being accessed.
Google shouldn’t control that.
I think there’s an argument to be made here of why are we trusting certificate providers anyway since that just adds another layer of centralization and a choke point for governments to attack. Why not use self-signed certificates and have each search engine indexer also index the certificate and point out how long it has been since it has changed so that you can trust whatever search engine you wish instead of these mega centralized providers of certificates. If kagi, google, ddg, and quant (for example) are all in agreement about the validity of a cert i feel its likely trustworthy. If they start disagreeing thats when it may be time to DYOR. Besides, TOFU is much easier to set up.
This will be a huge pain for the small business websites I administer, which really don’t need SSL to begin with except to please Google.
All public websites need SSL.
If you’re truly unaware of why TLS is necessary or how to automate the process then you should probably retire.
Archaic attitudes like yours are precisely why these restrictions are necessary.
Exactly. Setting up Let’s Encrypt is really easy, and once it’s set up, you don’t have to think about it.
I did it for self-hosted stuff, and it’s trivial. You can even do DNS challenge auth instead of HTTP and you don’t need to have port 80 open at all, but you do need a login token for your DNS host for the script.
The first one will probably take an hour or two if it’s your first time, and after that, it’s maybe 5 min per site.
Even that’s more steps than necessary.
Just serve your website with Caddy and it handles certs for you. The config is absolutely trivial compared to Apache, nginx, etc
I use Caddy, but there are a lot of options with decent documentation.
Not all DNS hosts support that. Webnames.ca, looking at you…
Also my workplace hosts their own dns and I think it will be a cold day in hell before they let me do automated updates.
Sure, but it’s really nice if it does.
I use Cloudflare, and my login token only supports editing DNS records, which is nice. If yours doesn’t, it may be worth switching to one that does. There are lots of options and many of them have a reasonable API.
Any DNS host that doesn’t support automation either starts building now or goes out of business when short certs are implemented.
