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.
Shit like this is why building websites is no longer fun for me like it was back in the 90s and 2000s. There’s way too much security shit to worry about now.
“You can set up your own email server at home, for fun!”
– The 90’s, Probably.
Lol. I’m kinda sad I missed out on that expressive time of making websites when I was growing up. You’re right, now everything is very homogenized and there’s a billion botswarms just waiting for you to be 3 seconds late to a security update so they can zombify your site for…
(Flips papers) Crypto somehow… it’s always crypto.
Internet crime isn’t even cool anymore. Lol
YES! Keep cutting it down!
Revocation is a lost cause and if you don’t automate you deserve what you get.
I have multiple self hosted services at home which are impossible to automate because they are not accessible from the internet without VPN. And some even don’t have internet access. Still me and my roommates are using them through a valid domain that points to the local address enabling https. Some services require https to function at all. After log4j i’ll never again open a “normal” port 80 or 443 to my local net. So thanks i guess. 90 days was annoying already. Great it works out for you
The solution is to not use Http based validation of the cert, but use dns based validation. Possibly combined with a wildcard cert for your whole domain. This is what I do for internal services on my LAN, along with split DNS so that the internal services aren’t even listed in public DNS.
Use DNS validation
Can you not issue your own certificate? I guess it depends on how many devices and what types of devices need to connect. It’s be a one time effort per device (importing your own self signed cert) versus one time effort per service per X days.
I did that for myself a few years back. But i can’t convince my roommates, let’s not even speak of guests, to install a (my) root certificate. My android phone still complains about “possibly supervised network traffic” since back when i installed my root ca. Maybe there is another solution im not aware of, but i can’t think of any
It’s so infuriating to me that there isn’t a way to just encrypt traffic without verifying it’s part of a chain. By all means, give a nag warning in browsers, but ugh, I think that ship has long since sailed. Plus, realistically, you’d need just as many scary warnings to deter the average user that they might be getting MITMed.
Dude, you need to figure out a way to automate that. It’s no way to live.
I agree, but it’s impossible to convince my less tech savy roommates and friends to let me install a root certificate. “That sounds like i could read all their private messages”, lol. Just let me have my certificate for https in my local net. I don’t need to be “even more” secure. I get that that’s necessary for public services, but surely not for local selfhosting. I don’t even have a port open other than wireguard. And i would not even care “if a roommate hacks/gets access to a guests voice commands for home assistant.” (Not complaining at you but at this trend. I do think my use case is valid)
You are gonna laugh if i tell you how i partly automated this workaround. A script changes the (dyn) dns entries of all subdomains to point to my public server in a datacenter. There, it ssh’s in and requests the certificates with certbot. Then, it restores the dns entries and downloads and installs the certificates in the local net. Still requires manual supervision and sometimes intervention. My domains do not support automated dnssec. I don’t have time to secure my local net enough to feel good about opening ports. If all certificate lifetimes get shorter, i’ll either have to switch my domain provider or give up selfhosting for other people.
Allowing a certificate without proper validation for local only networks is a terrible, terrible idea. I could super easily use this as a loophole to set up a honeypot public free wi-fi, redirect all traffic through a reverse proxy and man-in-the-middle every single HTTPS connection, effectively allowing me to harvest everyone’s passwords in a really quick and easy way.
Just use DNS verification. It’s not that hard.
I still think the web would have been better off if certificates were signed and part of a web of trust like in GPG/PGP. It wouldn’t stop sites from using trusted CAs to increase their trust levels with browsers, but it would mean that tiny websites wouldn’t need to go through layers of mandatory bullshit and inconvenience. Also means that key signers could have meaningful business relationships rather than being some random CA that nobody has a clue about.
3 letter organisms: NSA - CIA. People tend to think that as conspiracy theory… Even though we have so many real life examples about how the US and the 3 letters agencies have their hands all over the web and privacy and encryption is just a wet dream !
minor panic, oh, “2028”.
Might as well adjust the setting now. I had that same feeling for something they changed several years ago and never got around to changing it til all my stuff went down lol.
yeah good advice
Just skip to the point and make it 1 day
the whole point is to not break the internet. slow is fine
I’m sorry but if you aren’t using automated renewals then you are not using let’s encrypt the way it’s intended to be used. You should take this as an opportunity to get that set up.
Ours is automated, but we incur downtime on the renewal because our org forbids plain http so we have to do TLS-ALPN-01. It is a short downtime. I wish let’s encrypt would just allow http challenges over https while skipping the cert validation. It’s nuts that we have to meaningfully reply over 80…
Though I also think it’s nuts that we aren’t allowed to even send a redirect over 80…
Forgive my ignorance but why would that incur a downtime?
The only way I can think of for downtime to happen if you switched certs before the new one was signed (in which case …don’t) or am I missing something?
It also strikes me as weird that LE requires 80 but does allow insecure 443 after a redirect. Why not just do/allow insecure 443 in the first place?
Hot take: for-profit orgs should be buying TLS certificates from the CA cartel instead of using Let’s Encrypt. Unless you’re donating to LE, and in that case it’s cool.
Frankly, another choice virtually forced by the broader IT.
If the broader IT either provides or brokers a service, we are not allowed to independently spend money and must go through them.
Fine, they will broker commercial certificates, so just do that, right? Well, to renew a certificate, we have to open a ticket and attach our csr as well as a “business justification” and our dept incurs a hundred dollar internal charge for opening that ticket at all. Then they will let it sit for a day or two until one of their techs can get to it. Then we are likely to get feedback about something like their policy changing to forbid EC keys and we must do RSA instead, or vice versa because someone changed their mind. They may email an unexpected manager for confirmation in accordance to some new review process they implemented. Then, eventually, their tech manually renews it with a provider and attaches the certificate to the ticket.
It’s pretty much a loophole that we can use let’s encrypt because they don’t charge and technically the restrictions only come in when purchasing is involved. There was a security guy raising hell that some of our sites used that “insecure” let’s encrypt and demanding standards change to explicitly ban them, but the bearaucracy to do that was insurmountable so we continue.
our org forbids plain http
is redirecting http to https also out of the question? because let’s encrypt HTTP-01 accepts http -> https redirects:
Our implementation of the HTTP-01 challenge follows redirects, up to 10 redirects deep. It only accepts redirects to “http:” or “https:”, and only to ports 80 or 443. It does not accept redirects to IP addresses. When redirected to an HTTPS URL, it does not validate certificates.
They in fact refuse to even do a redirect… it’s monumentally stupid and I’ve repeatedly complained, but ‘security’ team says port 80 doing anything but dropping the packet or connection refused is bad…
Can’t use DNS?
The same screwed up IT that doesn’t let us do HTTP-01 challenges also doesn’t let us do DNS except through some bs webform, and TXT records are not even vaguely in their world.
It sucks when you are stuck with a dumber broad IT organization…
Wow…
Yikes. I feel for you man.
I’ve got it setup automated on all my external domains, but trying to automate it on my internal-only domain is rather tedious since not only do I NOT want to open a port for it to confirm, but I have 2 other devices/services on the network not behind my primary reverse proxy that share the same cert.
What In need to do is setup my own custom cron that hits the hosting provider to update the DNS txt entries. Then I need to have it write and restart the services that use the cert. I’ve tried to automate this once before and it did not go so smoothly so I’ve been hesitant on wasting time to try it again… But maybe it’s time to.
What would be ideal is if I could allow it to be automated just by getting a one time dns approval and storing a local private/public key to prove to them that I’m the owner of the domain or something. Not aware of this being possible though.
Depends on which DNS service you are using, a plugin might already exist that would do it for you. e.g. I use cloudflare for DNS and certbot is able to automatically set the txt record.
Technically my renews aren’t automated. I have a nightly cronjob that should renew certificates and restart services, but when the certificates need renewal, it always fails because it wants to open a port I’m already using in order to answer the challenge.
I hear there’s an apache module / configuration I can use, but I never got around to setting it up. So, when the cron job fails, I get an email and go run a script that stops apache, renews certs, and restarts services (including apache). I will be a bit annoying to have to do that more often, but maybe it’ll help motivate me to configure apache (or whatever) correctly.
Debian Stable
The usual way for me is to give certbot write access to a directory in the HTTP root, so the server can keep running.
It does have access to the HTTP root directories. But, it still can’t open port 80/443 when apache already has that port open.
EDIT: I guess my
certbot renewjust needs to be reconfigured to use a--webroot, so it doesn’t try to listen on it’s own.
You could try using the DNS challenge instead; I find it a lot more convenient as not all my services are exposed.
I’m using automated renewals.
But, that just means there’s a new cert file on disk. Now I have to convince a half a dozen different apps to properly reload that changed cert. That means fighting with Systemd. So Systemd has won the first few skirmishes, and I haven’t had the time or energy to counterattack. Now instead of having to manually poke at it 4x per year, it’s going to be closer to once a month. Ugh.
Half a dozen sounds like a lot, kinda curious what you are running? If they all are web services maybe use a reverse proxy or something?
Web services, and then various components of an email system.
If you have the time to set it up, Stalwart can manage its own cert renewal.
I don’t want to have to completely redo my whole email stack.
Don’t worry, they’ll sell you new software for another $50.00/m/certificate to help with the new certificate fiddling you now have to do monthly. It didn’t make sense for them to release it until they pushed through the 45 day window change through backchannels.
While I agree for my personal use, it’s not so easy in an enterprise environment. I’m currently working to get services migrated OFF my servers that utilize public certificates to avoid the headache of manual intervention every 45 days.
While this is possible for servers and services I manage, it’s not so easy for other software stacks we have in our environment. Thankfully I don’t manage them, but I’m sure I’ll be pulled into them at some point or another to help figure out the best path forward.
The easy path is obviously a load balanced front-end to load the certificate, but many of these services are specialized and have very elaborate ways to bind certificates to services outside of IIS or Apache, which would need to trust the newly issued load balancer CA certificate every 47 days.
Yeah, this has become an issue for us at work as well.
Currently we are doing a POC for an in-house developed solution where a azure function app handles the renewal of certificates for any domain we have, both wildcard and named, and place the certificates in a key vault where services that need them can get access.
Looks to be working, so the main issue now is finding a non-US certificate provider that supports acme. EU has some but even more local there aren’t many options.
Just saying:
There are alternatives for LE,not for all things, but for a lot. Afaik not all of them do follow suit.
I’m trying to think of the last time I heard news about something to do with the internet getting better instead of worse, and I’m genuinely coming up blank.
Make no mistake: this is an improvement.
There are substantial unsolvable issues with long lived certificates, and automatic deployment of very short lived certificates is the way to solve them.
Plan for certificate validity of six days in a few years.
Automated certificates are relatively new and pretty neat. Killing off the certificate cartels is an added bonus.
Yeah, I think Letsencrypt (and others) are one of the best things to happen for the internet.
You used to have to cough up a good chunk of monies for a certificate.
Now it’s easily accessible and you (i) never have to think about it after the first setup because a robot automatically renews expiring certificates for me.
Generally this is one of the best improvements: a more secure web that is easier to achieve.
Wait, how’s this worse? This makes the Internet safer by reducing the window a leaked key can do harm.
Let’s all just start self signing in protest
Just let me know so I can change my crontabs.
The five-assed monkey of cert lifetimes.
As useless measures go this will certainly be one; especially while CRLs are a thing.
Coming soon. Daily certs. Just $19.99 a month.
Reducing the validity timespan will not solve the problem, it only reduces the risk. And how big is that risk really? I’m an amateur and would love to see some real malicious case descriptions that would have been avoided had the certificate been revoked earlier…
Anybody have some pointers?
Terminology: revoked means the issuer of the certificate has decided that the certificate should not be trusted anymore even though it is still valid.
If a attacker gets access to a certificates key, they can impersonate the server until the validity period of the cert runs out or it is revoked by the CA. However … revocation doesn’t work. The revocation lists arent checked by most clients so a stolen cert will be accepted potentially for a very long time.
The second argument for shorter certs is adoption of new technology so certs with bad cryptographic algorithms are circled out quicker.
And third argument is: if the validity is so short you don’t want to change the certs manually and automate the process, you can never forget and let your certs expire.
We will probably get to a point of single day certs or even one cert per connection eventually and every step will be saver than before (until we get to single use certs which will probably fuck over privacy)
It really just helps in cases where you get hacked, but the hacker doesn’t have continued access. Say someone physically penetrates into your building, grabs the key through an unlocked station, and leaves.
That being said, like you mentioned, if someone is going through this effort, 45 days vs 90 days likely won’t matter. They’ll probably have the data they need after a week anyways.
Encryption key theft really requires a secondary attack afterwards to get the encrypted data by getting into the middle and either decrypting or redirecting traffic. It’s very much a state level/high-corporate attack, not some random group trying to make a few bucks.
No, but I have a link showing how ISPs and CAs colluded to do a MITM https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/
Shorter cert lifespan would not prevent this.
I’ve been dreading this switch for months (I still am, but I have been, too!) considering this year and next year will each double the amount of cert work my team has to do. But, I’m hopeful that the automation work I’m doing will pay off in the long run.
Are you not using LE certbot to handle renewals? I can’t even imagine doing this manually.
Personally, yes. Everything is behind NPM and SSL cert management is handled by certbot.
Professionally? LOL NO. Shit is manual and usually regulated to overnight staff. Been working on getting to the point it is automated though, but too many bespoke apps for anyone to have cared enough to automate the process before me.
I’m in the same boat here. I keep sounding the alarm and am making moves so that MY systems won’t be impacted, but it’s not holding water with the other people I work with and the systems they manage. I’m torn between manual intervention to get it started or just letting them deal with it themselves once we hit 45 day renewal periods.
Can you not just setup an nginx reverse proxy at the network edge to handle the ssl for the domain(s) and not have to worry about the app itself being setup for it? That’s how I’ve always managed all software personal or professional
Unfortunately some apps require the certificate be bound to the internal application, and need to be done so through cli or other methods not easily automated. We could front load over reverse proxy but we would still need to take the proxy cert and bind to the internal service for communication to work properly. Thankfully that’s for my other team to figure out as I already have a migration plan for systems I manage.
Why can’t you just have a long lived internally signed cert on your archaic apps and LE at the edge on a modern proxy? It’s easy enough to have the proxy trust the internal cert and connect to your backend service that shouldn’t know the difference if there’s a proxy or not.
Or is your problem client side?
That’s actually a really good idea. I’m not the person you replied to, but I’m taking notes.
One reason for the short certs is to push faster adoption of new technology. Yes that’s about new cryptography in the certs but if you still change all your certs by hand maybe you need to be forced …
As some selfhosting novice who uses NPM with auto renewal - I feel that I shouln’t be ocncerned.
Check your autorenewal failure alerts go somewhere you’ll react to.
It’s the “change your password often odyssey” 2.0. If it is safe, it is safe, it doesn’t become unsafe after an arbitrary period of time (if the admin takes care and revokes compromised certs). If it is unsafe by design, the design flaw should be fixed, no?
Or am I missing the point?
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.
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?)
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.
Only matters for LE certs.
You can still buy 1 year certsFor 3 more months or so, you can’t buy them in april 2026 anymore
oh? Damn
They are going down to 200 day expiration in March 2026. You can still buy 5 year certificates today but you still need to reissue them in 365 day cadence.
The point is, if the certificate gets stolen, there’s no GOOD mechanism for marking it bad.
If your password gets stolen, only two entities need to be told it’s invalid. You and the website the password is for.
If an SSL certificate is stolen, everyone who would potentially use the website need to know, and they need to know before they try to contact the website. SSL certificate revocation is a very difficult communication problem, and it’s mostly ignored by browsers because of the major performance issues it brings having to double check SSL certs with a third party.
The point is, if the certificate gets stolen, there’s no GOOD mechanism for marking it bad.
That’s what OCSP is for. Only Google isn’t playing along as per that wiki entry.
I mean, are you intending to retroactively add SSL to every tool implementing SSL in the past few decades?…
Browsers aren’t the only thing that ingress SSL.
But browsers have a marker for dangerous sites - surely Cloudflare, Amazon or Google should have a report system and deliver warnings at the base
Browsers are only a (large) fraction of SSL traffic.
So is there an example of SSL certs being stolen and used nefariously. Only thing that sticks out to me is certificate authorities being bad.
Yep. https://fedia.io/m/selfhosted@lemmy.world/t/3090624/Decreasing-Certificate-Lifetimes-to-45-Days/comment/13237364#entry-comment-13237364
