31–40 of 158 posts
It is already getting dangerously close to the duration of holiday freeze windows, compliance/audit enforced windows, etc.
Not to mention the undue bloat of CT logs.
As someone who works at a company who has to manage millions of SSL certificates for IoT devices in extremely terrible network situations I dread this. One of the biggest issues is handling renewals at scale, and I hate it. Another increasingly frusturation is challenges via DNS are not quick.
Since we're on the topic of certificates, my app (1M+ logins per day) uses certificate pinning with a cert that lasts for one year, because otherwise it would be a nightmare to roll the cert multiple times in production. But what would be the "modern" way to do smart and automated certificate pinning, now that short-lived certs are becoming the trend?
Pin the cert authority instead?
Why not 7 days then
Since we're on the topic of certificates, my app (1M+ logins per day) uses certificate pinning with a cert that lasts for one year, because otherwise it would be a nightmare to roll the cert multiple times in production. But what would be the "modern" way to do smart and automated certificate pinning, now that short-lived certs are becoming the trend?
The real modern way to do certificate pinning is to not do certificate pinning at all, but I'm sure that you've already heard this countless times before. An alternative option would be to run your own private CA, generate a new public/private keypair every 45 days, and generate certificates with that public key using both your private CA and Let's Encrypt, and then pin your private CA instead of the leaf certificates.
Since we're on the topic of certificates, my app (1M+ logins per day) uses certificate pinning with a cert that lasts for one year, because otherwise it would be a nightmare to roll the cert multiple times in production. But what would be the "modern" way to do smart and automated certificate pinning, now that short-lived certs are becoming the trend?
Until web browsers started to believe that no, that was too much of a convenience, so now long expiration certs became rejected. What's the proposed solution from the "industry"? to run a whole automation pipeline just to update a file in each example folder every few months? bonkers. These should be static examples, no reason to having to update those any earlier than every few years, at most.
I'm all for it -- it's hard to understate the extent to which LetsEncrypt has improved the WebPKI situation. Although the effective single-vendor situation isn't great, the "this is just something you only do via an automated API" approach is absolutely the right one. And certificate lifetimes measured in days work just fine with that. The only things that continue to amaze me are the number of (mostly "enterprise")…
> The only things that continue to amaze me are the number of (mostly "enterprise") software products that simply won't get with the times Yeah, no one's rewriting a bunch of software to support automating a specific, internet-facing, sometimes-reliable CA. Yes it's ACME, a standard you say. A standard protocol with nonstop changing profile requirements at LE's whim. Who's going to keep updating the software every 3…
I have multiple systems. Legacy that I've inherited, and modern that are able to automatically update their certs.
The automated updates require almost zero maintenance, there was a week a couple of years ago when I had to switch some configuration for a new root cert.
The legacy system requires manual installation and multiple weeks of my time every year because of the number of environments, and since generation of the certs requires me to file a request for someone to manually create it, they invariably typo something and it has to be redone everywhere.
So multiple engineers, over multiple weeks?
Manual process at a guess is £50k pa, while the automated is close to an annual £0?