It's really not that hard to automate renewals and monitor a system's certificate status from a different system, just in case the automation breaks and for things that require manual renewal steps.
I get that it's harder in large organisations and that not everything can be automated yet, but you still have a year before the certificate lifetime goes down to 200 days, which IMO is pretty conservative.
With a known timeline like this, customers/employees have ammunition to push their vendors/employers to invest into automation and monitoring.
None of the platforms which I deal with will likely magically support automated renewal in the next year. I will likely spend most of the next year reducing our exposure to PKI.
Smaller organizations dependent on off the shelf software will be killed by this. They'll probably be forced to move things to the waiting arms of the Big Tech cloud providers that voted for this. (Shocker.) And it probably won't help stop the bleeding.
And again, there's no real world security benefit. Nobody in the CA/B has ever discussed real world examples of threats this solves. Just increasingly niche theoretical ones. In a zero cost situation, improving theoretical security is good, but in a situation like this where the cost is real fragility to the Internet ecosystem, decisions like this need to be justified.
Unfortunately the CA/B is essentially unchecked power, no individual corporate member is going to fire their representatives for this, much less is there a way to remove everyone that made this incredibly harmful decision.
This is a group of people who have hammers and think everything is a nail, and unfortunately, that includes a lot of ceramic and glass.
This will be painful for people in the short term, but in the long term I believe it will make things more automated, more secure, and less fragile.
Browsers are the ones pushing for this change. They wouldn't do it if they thought it would cause people to see more expired certificate warnings.
> Unfortunately the CA/B is essentially unchecked power, no individual corporate member is going to fire their representatives for this, much less is there a way to remove everyone that made this incredibly harmful decision.
Representatives are not voting against the wishes/instructions of their employer.
Unfortunately the problem is likely too removed from understanding for employers to care. Google and Microsoft do not realize how damaging the CA/B is, and probably take the word of their CA/B representatives that the choices that they are making are necessary and good.
I doubt Satya Nadella even knows what the CA/B is, much less that he pays an employee full-time to directly #### over his entire customer base and that this employee has nearly god-level control over the Internet. I have yet to see an announcement from the CA/B that represented a competent decision that reflected the reality of the security industry and business needs, and yet... nobody can get in trouble for it!
If an organisation ignores all those options, then I suppose they should keep doing it manually. But at the end of the day, that is a choice.
Maybe they'll reconsider now that the lifetime is going down or implement their own client if they're that scared of third party code.
Yeah, this will inconvenience some of the CA/B participant's customers. They knew that. It'll also make them and everyone else more secure. And that's what won out.
The idea that this change got voted in due to incompetence, malice, or lack of oversight from the companies represented on the CA/B forum is ridiculous to me.
The ballot is nothing but expected
The whole industry has been moving in this direction for the last decade
So there is nothing much to say
Except that if you waited the last moment, well you will have to be in a hurry. (non)Actions have consequences :)
I'm glad by this decision because that'll hammer a bit down those resisting, those who but a human do perform yearly renewal. Let's how stupid it can get.
Are the security benefits really worth making anything with a valid TLS certificate stop working if it is air-gapped or offline for 48 days?
> CAs and certificate consumers (browsers) voted in favour of this change. They didn't do this because they're incompetent but because they think it'll improve security.
They're not incompetent and they're not "evil", and this change does improve some things. But the companies behind the top level CA ecosystem have their own interests which might not always align with those of end users.
CAs have now implemented MPIC. This may have thwarted some attacks, but those attackers still have valid certificates today and can request a new certificate without any domain control validation being performed in over a year.
BGP hijackings have been uncovered in the last 5 years and MPIC does make this more difficult. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGP_hijacking
New security standards should come into effect much faster. For fixes against attacks we know about today and new ones that are discovered and mitigated in the future.
CAs used to be able to use WHOIS for DCV. The fact that this option was taken away from everyone is good. It's the same with this change, and you have plenty of time to prepare for it.
"The goal is to minimize risks from outdated certificate data, deprecated cryptographic algorithms, and prolonged exposure to compromised credentials. It also encourages companies and developers to utilize automation to renew and rotate TLS certificates, making it less likely that sites will be running on expired certificates."
I'm not even sure what "outdated certificate data" could be. The browser by default won't negotiate a connection with an expired certificate
Agree.
> According to the article:
Thanks, I did read that, it's not quite what I meant though. Suppose a security engineer at your company proposes that users should change their passwords every 49 days to "minimise prolonged exposure from compromised credentials" and encourage the uptake of password managers and passkeys.
How to respond to that? It seems a noble endeavour. To prioritise, you would want to know (at least):
a) What are the benefits - not mom & apple pie and the virtues of purity but as brass tacks - e.g: how many account compromises do you believe would be prevented by this change and what is the annual cost of those? How is that trending?
b) What are the cons? What's going to be the impact of this change on our customers? How will this affect our support costs? User retention?
I think I would have a harder time trying to justify the cert lifetime proposal than the "ridiculously frequent password changes" proposal. Sure, it's more hygenic but I can't easily point to any major compromises in the past 5 years that would have been prevented by shorter certificate lifetimes. Whereas I could at least handwave in the direction of users who got "password stuffed" to justify ridiculously frequent password changes.
The analogy breaks down in a bad way when it comes to evaluating the cons. The groups proposing to decrease cert lifetimes bear nearly none of the costs of the proposal, for them it is externalised. They also have little to no interest in use cases that don't involve "big cloud" because those don't make them any money.
In the case of OV/EV certificates, it could also include the organisation's legal name, country/locality, registration number, etc.
Forcing people to change passwords increases the likelihood that they pick simpler, algorithmic password so they can remember them more easily, reducing security. That's not an issue with certificates/private keys.
Shorter lifetimes on certs is a net benefit. 47 days seems like a reasonable balance between not having bad certs stick around for too long and having enough time to fix issues when you detect that automatic renewal fails.
The fact that it encourages people to prioritise implementing automated renewals is also a good thing, but I understand that it's frustrating for those with bad software/hardware vendors.
No, they did it because it reduces their legal exposure. Nothing more, nothing less.
The goal is to reduce the rotation time low enough that the certificates will rotate before legal procedures to stop them from rotating them can kick in.
This does very little to improve security.
Lower the lifetime of certs does mean that orgs will be better prepared to replace bad certs when they occur. That's a good thing.
More organisations will now take the time to configure ACME clients instead of trying to convince CA's that they're too special to have their certs revoked, or even start embarrassing court cases, which has only happened once as far as I know.
Theories that involve CAs, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Mozilla having ulterior motives and not considering potential downsides of this change are silly.
And also, it probably won't avoid problems. Because yes, the goal is automation and a couple weeks ago I was trying to access a site from an extremely large infrastructure security company which rotates their certificates every 24 hours. And their site was broke and the subreddit about their company was all complaining about it. Turns out automated daily rotation just means 365 more opportunities for breakage a year.
Even regular processes break, and now we're multiplying the breaking points... and again, at no real security benefit. There’s like... never ever been a case where a certificate leak caused a breach.
This is fundamentally a skill issue. If a human can replace the certificate, so can a machine. Write a script.
Now? It's a spaghetti of politics and emotional warfare. Grown adults who can't handle being told that they might not be up to the task and it's time to part ways. If that's the honest truth, it's not "mean," just not what that person would like to hear.
Everyone in the CA/B should be fired from their respective employers, and we honestly need to wholesale plan to dump PKI by 2029 if we can't get a resolution to this.