Part of this might be my general disdain towards sysadmins who don’t know the first thing about technology and security, but I can’t help but notice that article is weirdly biased:
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.
Kind of weird to praise random Reddit users who might or might not actually sysadmins that much for not keeping up with the news, or put any kind of importance onto Reddit comments in the first place.
Personally, I’m much more partial to the opinions of actual security researchers and hope this passes. All publicly used services should use automated renewals with short lifespans. If this isn’t possible for internal devices some weird reason, that’s what private CAs are for.
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.
spending $300 every 90 days instead of 365 days is so much better /s
i hate apple so much
Who is buying SSL certs for $300? Is this an enterprise thing? I’m using free certs on AWS. LetsEncrypt is also fine for self-hosting.
It is an enterprise thing, yes.
I’m sorry, but has no-one heard of https://letsencrypt.org that issues certificates via API for free?
I would not be surprised if certificates at some point will be issued for each session.
I’m sorry, but have you ever needed to manage some certificates for a legacy system or something that isn’t just a simple public facing webserver?
Automation becomes complicated very quickly. And you don’t want to give DNS mutation access to all those systems to renew with DNS-01.
Ahh yes the: we can’t have self signed certificates for security reasons but also can’t open up the environment to the web, and we dont have our own CA server, trifecta.
Solution: awkward, manual, certificate import process from a 3rd party vendor.
Even if you have an internal CA, few appliances support this kind of automation. At best, they have an API, and you get to write that automation yourself for each appliance.
Knew a place where, for some devices, it was only available via a web interface. It was automated via WebDriver by a sysadmin that was losing his mind.
You can delegate to isolated nameservers with DNS-01, there’s no need to have control over the primary zone: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/technical-deep-dive-securing-automation-acme-dns-challenge-validation
Yes, and that is where we enter the complicated territories…
How complicated is it to have a CNAME? /s
This’ll never happen. The rest of the computing world will just say “nah, get fucked”
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good, certificates should be automated anyways. Much more reliable than the once yearly outages because nobody renewed the thing or forgot some systems.
Good, certificates should be automated anyways.
The problem being when that can’t be easily automated? Did you read the article?
They should be automated too.
The fact that I can’t use terraform to automatically deploy certs to network appliances is a problem.
Technically, you shouldn’t even deploy certs to network appliances or servers but they should fetch certificates automatically from a vault. I know there’s minimal support for such things right now from some vendors, but that should be fixed by those vendors.
Even Microsoft supports such solutions in Azure both with PaaS components and Windows and Linux servers (in Azure or onprem) via extensions
True.
cert-manager is an amazing tool for deploying certificates for containerized applications. There’s no standardized way to deploy those certs outside of containers without scripting it yourself though, unfortunately.
Good incentive for the provider to fix it or go out of business.
