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.
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 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…
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.
So what’s the floor here realistically, are they going to lower it to 30 days, then 14, then 2, then 1? Will we need to log in every morning and expect to refresh every damn site cert we connect to soon?
It is ignoring the elephant in the room – the central root CA system. What if that is ever compromised?
Certificate pinning was a good idea IMO, giving end-users control over trust without these top-down mandated cert update schedules. Don’t get me wrong, LetsEncrypt has done and is doing a great service within the current infrastructure we have, but …
I kind of wish we could just partition the entire internet into the current “commercial public internet” and a new (old, redux) “hobbyist private internet” where we didn’t have to assume every single god-damned connection was a hostile entity. I miss the comraderie, the shared vibe, the trust. Yeah I’m old.
Will we need to log in every morning and expect to refresh every damn site cert we connect to soon?
Automate your certificate renewals. You should be automating updates for security anyway.
