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Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days (letsencrypt.org)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 31 points 9 months ago (6 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.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 child)

    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?)

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  • [–] 2 points 9 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.

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