Sysadmins slam Apple’s SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts
Sysadmins slam Apple’s SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts
Maximum validity down from 398 days to 45 by 2027
I'm sorry, but has no-one heard of https://letsencrypt.org that issues certificates via API for free?
I would not be surprised if certificates at some point will be issued for each session.
I'm sorry, but have you ever needed to manage some certificates for a legacy system or something that isn't just a simple public facing webserver?
Automation becomes complicated very quickly. And you don't want to give DNS mutation access to all those systems to renew with DNS-01.
You can delegate to isolated nameservers with DNS-01, there's no need to have control over the primary zone: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/technical-deep-dive-securing-automation-acme-dns-challenge-validation
Does not work well for large corporate roll outs. Last I checked no way to auto-enroll on a NetScaler or an F5
I'm not familiar with either, but Duck Duck Go suggests:
https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2015/12/09/using-lets-encrypt-for-free-ssl-certs-with-netscaler/
https://techdrabble.com/citrix/netscaler/18-letsencrypt-automated-certificate-with-citrix-netscaler
https://www.f5.com/company/blog/nginx/using-free-ssltls-certificates-from-lets-encrypt-with-nginx
AWS makes this impossible in a few places such as a fair number of ACM use-cases.
I think your cert-per-session idea is interesting. We’d need significant throughput and processing boosts to make that happen, probably at least on the order of 10X computing speeds and 10X transmission speeds across the board minimum. These operations are computationally intense and add data to the wire so, for example, a simple Lemmy server with hundreds of users slows to a crawl and a larger site eg Mastodon goes to dialup speeds or worse. You can test at home by trying to generate an x509 self-signed cert before connecting to a website every time.
Well AWS ACM already automates this, so if the renewal period gets shortened, I'm guessing that this will be updated to suit, unless I'm misunderstanding your point.
I hadn't considered the CPU load, but that's a fair point. I'm guessing that a suitable piece of code will utilise specialised hardware, or perhaps leverage the GPU or just in time SSL certificates will become a thing.
Part of this might be my general disdain towards sysadmins who don't know the first thing about technology and security, but I can't help but notice that article is weirdly biased:
Over the past couple of days, these unsung heroes who keep the internet up and running flocked to Reddit to bemoan their soon-to-be increasing workload.
Kind of weird to praise random Reddit users who might or might not actually sysadmins that much for not keeping up with the news, or put any kind of importance onto Reddit comments in the first place.
Personally, I'm much more partial to the opinions of actual security researchers and hope this passes. All publicly used services should use automated renewals with short lifespans. If this isn't possible for internal devices some weird reason, that's what private CAs are for.
I'm on the side of "automate it all and stop whining", but I do think it's important not to so readily dismiss the thoughts and opinions of those this directly affects in favour of the opinions of the security researchers pushing the change.
There are some legitimate issues with certain systems that aren't easily automated today. The issue is with those systems needing to be modernised, but there isn't a big push for that.
I'd be more concerned as well if this would be an over-night change, but I'd say that the rollout is slow and gradual enough that giving it more time would just lead to more procrastination instead, rather than finding solutions. Particularly for those following the news, which all sysadmins should, the reduction in certificate lifespan over time has been going on for a while now with a clear goal of automation becoming the only viable path forward.
I'll also go out on a limb and make a guess that a not insignificant amount of people only think that their "special" case can't be automated. I wouldn't even be surprised if many of those could be solved by a bog-standard reverse-proxy setup.
Usually the systems that need to be modernized are working, so nobody wants to invest in a new system that may require retraining the people that may be impacted. Then there’s some systems with integrations that may also require replacing so the integrations can continue to work.
Even then, there’s always a good possibility that the automation fails, especially in the first few iterations of trying to sort out the kinks, and third party automation tools aren’t perfect either. That’s another tool to have to update and maintain once all is said and done.
I’m not trying to rail too hard against the changes, but the impact is especially felt by the people managing the systems, who’s most likely getting more work tacked on to their workload of putting out fires behind the scenes.
I'm not an "actual security researcher" but I was an "actual security officer" at a reeeeally large shop.
Yes, researchers are right. But they don't dictate what else we have to let slide to allow time to work this constantly.
And neither are they on the hook for it.
They can be pedants, but they can't do it blind.
Lame. 45 days? 10 days for DCV? How common are exploits involving old certificates anyway? And automated cert management is just another exploit target. Do they seriously think an attacker who pwns a server can't keep the automatic renewals running?
The solution, according to Sectigo's Chief Compliance Officer Tim Callan, is to automate certificate management — unsurprising considering the firm sells software that does just this.
Any post/article with the word “slammed” in it gets a downvote and a no-read from me. That word needs to disappear from journalism/forums/life/etc.
This is the one case where I'd make an exception. I read through the threads, it got particularly heated.
As someone who creates custom domain name applications, FUCK THEM WITH A PINEAPPLE SPIKY SIDE FIRST. This problem is on par with timezones for needless complexity and communication disasters. Companys and advertisers are now adding man in the middle certs for additional data collection/visibility. If the ciphers not cracked, changing the certs exposes significantly more failure, than letting one get a little stale.
Sysadmin used slam! It's super effective!
The Register is deliberately tabloid-like in style (right up to the "red top" site banner), but is good quality (at least when I read it).
They won't write an article about science without using the word "boffins" either. It's just their thing.
If approved, it will affect all Safari certificates, which follows a similar push by Google, that plans to reduce the max-validity period on Chrome for these digital trust files down to 90 days.
Max lifespans of certs have been gradually decreasing over the years in an ongoing effort to boost internet security. Prior to 2011, they could last up to about eight years. As of 2020, it's about 13 months.
Apple's proposal would shorten the max certificate lifespan to 200 days after September 2025, then down to 100 days a year later and 45 days after April 2027. The ballot measure also reduces domain control validation (DCV), phasing that down to 10 days after September 2027.
And while it's generally agreed that shorter lifespans improve internet security overall — longer certificate terms mean criminals have more time to exploit vulnerabilities and old website certificates — the burden of managing these expired certs will fall squarely on the shoulders of systems administrators.
Over the past couple of days, these unsung heroes who keep the internet up and running flocked to Reddit to bemoan their soon-to-be increasing workload. As one noted, while the proposal "may not pass the CABF ballot, but then Google or Apple will just make it policy anyway…"
...
However, as another sysadmin pointed out, automation isn't always the answer. "I've got network appliances that require SSL certs and can't be automated," they wrote. "Some of them work with systems that only support public CAs."
Another added: "This is somewhat nightmarish. I have about 20 appliance like services that have no support for automation. Almost everything in my environment is automated to the extent that is practical. SSL renewal is the lone achilles heel that I have to deal with once every 365 days."
Until next year, anyway.
spending $300 every 90 days instead of 365 days is so much better /s
i hate apple so much
I was in a meeting before the summer discussing this with Digicert we asked if you would need to pay every 90 days.
They answered that certs will still be bought at 1, 2, or 3 year intervals but can be renewed for free every 90 days.
It's pretty obvious when you think about it really.
Smells like Apple knows something but can’t say anything. What reason would they want lifespans cut so short other than they know of an attack vector that means more than 10 days isn’t safe?
AFAIK they’re not a CA that sells certs so this can’t be some money making scheme. And they’ll be very aware how unpopular 10 day lifespans would be to services that suck and require manual download and upload every time you renew.
Smells like you didn't read the article, it's an ongoing trend:
Max lifespans of certs have been gradually decreasing over the years in an ongoing effort to boost internet security. Prior to 2011, they could last up to about eight years. As of 2020, it's about 13 months.
Reducing it to one year made sense, one year down to 10 days is actually a fucking massive difference. Practically speaking, it’s a far, far bigger change than 8 years down to 1.
This isn’t just an “ongoing trend” at this point, it would be a fundamental change to the way that certificates are managed i.e. making it impossible to handle renewals manually for any decently sized business.
Thank you for the smug response however I did indeed read the article and going from 13 months to 10 days is not a trend but a complete rearchitecture of how certificates are managed.
You have no idea how many orgs have to do this manually as their systems won’t enable it to be automated. Following a KBA once a year is fine for most (yet they still forget and websites break for a few days; this literally happened to NVD of all things a few weeks ago).
This change is a 36x increase in effort with no consideration for those who can’t renew and apply certs programmatically / through automation.
Automated certificate lifecycle management is going to be the norm for businesses moving forward.
This seems counter-intuitive to the goal of "improving internet security". Automation is a double-edged sword. Convenient, sure, but also an attack vector, one where malicious activity is less likely to be noticed, because actual people aren't involved in tbe process, anymore.
We've got ample evidence of this kinda thing with passwords: increasing complexity requirements and lifetime requirements improves security, only up to a point. Push it too far, and it actually ends up DECREASING security, because it encourages bad practices to get around the increased burden of implementation.
Just going to mention my zero-dependency ACME (Let's Encrypt) library: https://github.com/clshortfuse/acmejs
It runs on Chrome, Safari, FireFox, Deno, and NodeJS.
I use it to spin up my wildcard and HTTP certificates. I've personally automated it by having the certificate upload to S3 buckets and AWS Certificates. I wrote a helper for Name.com for DNS validation. For HTTP validation, I use HTTP PUT.
Why have this run in the browser? Why not just have it run on the server and renew in the background?
time to shine for DANE (actually no since the world sucks)
Slams!
In this case slams means "slightly irritated by"
This'll never happen. The rest of the computing world will just say "nah, get fucked"
Sounds like free money for all those certificate authorities out there. Imma start my own CA with blackjack and hookers.
Or... They do what they did last time the lifetime was cut down from 3-10 years down to 395 days... Just issue you a new certificate when the old one runs out and up to whatever the time period you bought it for...?
Let's Encrypt isn't the only CA to use ACME, you can auto renew with basically any CA that implemented it (spoiler: most of them have)
Good, certificates should be automated anyways. Much more reliable than the once yearly outages because nobody renewed the thing or forgot some systems.
Good, certificates should be automated anyways.
The problem being when that can't be easily automated? Did you read the article?