468
Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days (letsencrypt.org)
submitted 9 months ago by 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Isn't this just CRL in reverse? And CRL sucks or we wouldn't be having this discussion. Part of the point of cryptographically signing a cert is so you don't have to do this if you trust the issuer.

Cryptography already makes it infeasible for a malicious actor to create a fake cert. The much more common attack vector is having a legitimate cert's private key compromised.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    No, these are completely separate issues.

    • CRL: protect against certificates that have their private key compromised
    • CT: protect against incompetent or malicious Certificate Authorities.

    This is just one example why we have certificate transparency. Revocation wouldn't be useful if it isn't even known which certificates need revocation.

    The National Informatics Centre (NIC) of India, a subordinate CA of the Indian Controller of Certifying Authorities (India CCA), issues rogue certificates for Google and Yahoo domains. NIC claims that their issuance process was compromised and that only four certificates were misissued. However, Google is aware of misissued certificates not reported by NIC, so it can only be assumed that the scope of the breach is unknown.

    Source

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent