TLS certificate lifetimes will officially reduce to 47 days | Hacker News Reader

TLS certificate lifetimes will officially reduce to 47 days

digicert.com

512 pointscrtasm676 comments

What's the end game here? I agree with the dissent. Why not make it 30 seconds?

Once we cross the threshold of "I absolutely have to automate everything or it's not viable to use TLS anymore", why do we care about providing anything beyond ~48 hours? I am willing to bet money this threshold will never be crossed.

This feels like much more of an ideological mission than a practical one, unless I've missed some monetary/power advantage to forcing everyone to play musical chairs with their entire infra once a month...

I'm on the team at Let's Encrypt that runs our CA, and would say I've spent a lot of time thinking about the tradeoffs here.

Let's Encrypt has always self-imposed a 90 day limit, though of course with this ballot passing we will now have to reduce that under 47 days in the future.

Shorter lifetimes have several advantages:

1. Reduced pressure on the revocation system. For example, if a domain changes hands, then any previous certificates spend less time in the revoked state. That makes CRLs smaller, a win for everyone involved.

2. Reduced risk for certificates which aren't revoked but should have been, perhaps because a domain holder didn't know that a previous holder of that domain had it, or an attack of any sort that led to a certificate being issued that wasn't desired.

3. For fully short-lived certs (under 7 days), many user-agents don't do revocation checks at all, because that's a similar timeline to our existing revocation technology taking effect. This is a performance win for websites/user-agents. While we advocate for full certificate automation, I recognize there are cases where that's not so easy, and doing a monthly renewal may be much more tractable.

Going to shorter than a few days is a reliability and scale risk. One of the biggest issues with scale today is that Certificate Transparency logs, while providing great visibility into what certs exist (see points 1 and 2), will have to scale up significantly as lifetimes are cut.

Why is this happening now, though? I can't speak for everyone, and this is only my own opinion on what I'm observing, but: One big industry problem that's been going on for the last year or two is that CAs have found themselves in situations where they need to revoke certificates because of issues with those certificates, but customers aren't able to respond on an appropriate timeline. So the big motivation for a lot of the parties here is to get these timelines down and really prove a push towards automation.

When I first set up Let's Encrypt I thought I'd manually update the cert one per year. The 90 day limit was a surprise. This blog post helped me understand (it repeats many of your points) https://letsencrypt.org/2015/11/09/why-90-days/

So it's being pushed because it'll be easier for a few big players in industry. Everybody else suffers.

It's a decision by Certificate Authorities, the ones that sell TLS certificate services, and web browser vendors. One benefits from increased demand on their product, while the other benefits by increasing the overhead on the management of their software, which increases the minimum threshold to be competitive.

There are security benefits, yes. But as someone that works in infrastructure management, including on 25 or 30 year old systems in some cases, it's very difficult to not find this frustrating. I need tools I will have in 10 years to still be able to manage systems that were implemented 15 years ago. That's reality.

Doubtless people here have connected to their router's web interface using the gateway IP address and been annoyed that the web browser complains so much about either insecure HTTP or an unverified TLS certificate. The Internet is an important part of computer security, but it's not the only part of computer security.

I wish technical groups would invest some time in real solutions for long-term, limited access systems which operate for decades at a time without 24/7 access to the Internet. Part of the reason infrastructure feels like running Java v1.3 on Windows 98 is because it's so widely ignored.

Or, equivalently, it's being pushed because customers of "big players", of which there are a great many, are exposed to security risk by the status quo that the change mitigates.

It makes the system more reliable and more secure for everyone.

I think that's a big win.

The root reason is that revocation is broken, and we need to do better to get the security properties we demand of the Web PKI.

"Suffer" is a strong word for those of us who've been using things like Let's Encrypt for years now without issue.

Unless I misunderstood, GP mentions that the problem stems from WebPKI's central role in server identity management. Think of these cert lifetimes as forcefully being signed out after 47 days of being signed in.

> easier for a few big players in industry

Not necessarily. OP mentions, more certs would mean bigger CT logs. More frequent renewals mean more load. Like with everything else, this seems like a trade-off. Unfortunately, for you & I, as customers of cert authorities, 47 days is where the now the agreed cut-off is (not 42).

I think a very short lived cert (like 7 days) could be a problem on renewal errors/failures that don't self correct but need manual intervention.

What will let's encrypt be like with 7day certs? Will it renew them every day(6 day reaction time), or every 3 days (4 days reaction time). Not every org is suited with 24/7 staffing, some people go on holidays, some public holidays extend to long weekends etc :). I would argue that it would be a good idea to give people a full week to react to renewal problems. That seems impossible for short lived certs.

Like Apple case. Apple already ask their developer to re-sign the app every 7 days. It should not be the problem.

Since you’ve thought about it a lot, in an ideal world, should CAs exist at all?

There's no such thing as an ideal world, just the one we have.

Let's Encrypt was founded with a goal of rapidly (within a few years) helping get the web to as close to 100% encrypted as we could. And we've succeeded.

I don't think we could have achieved that goal any way other than being a CA.

In an ideal world where we rebuilt the whole stack from scratch, the DNS system would securely distribute key material alongside IP addresses and CAs wouldn't be needed. Most modern DNS alternatives (Handshake, Namecoin, etc) do exactly this, but it's very unlikely any of them will be usurping DNS anytime soon, and DNS's attempts to implement similar features have been thus far unsuccessful.

No they should not

DANE is the way (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Na...)

But no browser have support for it, so .. :/

This is a great question. If we don't have CAs, how do we know if it OK to trust a cert?

Are there any reasonable alternatives to CAs in a modern world? I have never heard any good proposals.

In an ideal world we could just trust people not to be malicious, and there wouldn't be any need to encrypt traffic at all.

How relevant is that since we don't live in such a world? Unless you have a way to get to to such a world, of course, but even then CAs would need to keep existing until you've managed to bring the ideal world about. It would be a mistake to abolish them first and only then start on idealizing the world.

CAs exist on the intersection of reality (far from ideal) and cryptography.

What alternatives come to mind when asking that question? Not being in the PKI world directly, web of trust is what comes to mind, but I'm curious what your question hints at.

4. Encrypted traffic hoarders would have to break more certs.

This one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

I love the push that LE puts on industry to get better.

I work in a very large organisation and I just dont see them being able to go to automated TLS certificates for their self managed subdomains, inspection certificates, or anything else for that matter. It will be interesting to see how the short lived certs are adopted into the future.

Are you aware of a single real world not theoretical security breach caused by an unrevoked certificate that lived too long?

A real-world example of this would be Heartbleed, where users rotated without revoking their previously compromised certificates[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed#Certificate_renewal...

Could you explain why Let's Encrypt is dropping OCSP stabling support, instead of dropping it for must-staple only certificates and letting those of us who want must-staple to deal with the headaches? I believe that resolving the privacy concerns involving OCSP raised did not require eliminating must-staple.

Must-staple has almost zero adoption. The engineering cost of supporting it for a feature that is nearly unused just isn’t there.

We did consider it.

As CAs prepare for post-quantum in the next few years, it will become even less practical as there is going to be pressure to cut down the number of signatures in a handshake.

How viable are tls attacks, assuming a signed private cert is compromised, you need network position or other things to trigger routing, no?

So for a bank, a private cert compromise is bad, for a regular low traffic website, probably not so much?

All of that in case the previous owner of the domain would attempt a mitm attack against a client of the new owner, which is such a remote scenario. In fact has it happened even once?

Realistically, how often are domains traded and suddenly put in legitimate use (that isn't some domain parking scam) that (1) and (2) are actual arguments? Lol

Domain trading (regardless if the previous use was legitimate or not) is only one example, not the sole driving argument for why the revocation system is in place or isn't perfectly handled.

> but customers aren't able to respond on an appropriate timeline

Sounds like your concept of the customer/provider relationship is inverted here.

No. The customer is violating their contract.

The whole "customer is king" doesn't apply to something as critical as PKI infrastructure, because it would compromise the safety of the entire internet. Any CA not properly applying the rules will be removed from the trust stores, so there can be no exceptions for companies who believe they are too important to adhere to the contract they signed.

The "end game" is mentioned explicitly in the article:

> Shorter lifetimes mitigate the effects of using potentially revoked certificates. In 2023, CA/B Forum took this philosophy to another level by approving short-lived certificates, which expire within 7 days, and which do not require CRL or OCSP support.

Shorter-lived certificates make OCSP and other revocation mechanisms less of a load-bearing component within the Web PKI. This is a good thing, since neither CAs nor browsers have managed to make timely revocation methods scale well.

(I don't think there's any monetary or power advantage to doing this. The reason to do it is because shorter lifetimes make it harder for server operators to normalize deviant certificate operation practices. The reasoning there is the same as with backups or any other period operational task: critical processes must be continually tested and evaluated for correctness.)

Don't lower cert times also get people to trust certs that were created just for their session to MITM them?

That is the next step in nation state tapping of the internet.

I don't see why it would; the same basic requirements around CT apply regardless of certificate longevity. Any CA caught enabling this kind of MITM would be subject to expedient removal from browser root programs, but with the added benefit that their malfeasance would be self-healing over a much shorter period than was traditionally allowed.

lol no? lower cert times still extend the root certificates that are already trusted. It is not a noticeable thing when browsing the web as a user.

A MITM cert would need to be manually trusted, which is a completely different thing.

>unless I've missed some monetary/power advantage

the power dynamic here is that the CAs have a "too big to fail" inertia, where they can do bad things without consequence because revoking their trust causes too much inconvenience for too many people. shortening expiry timeframes to the point where all their certificates are always going to expire soon anyways reduces the harm that any one CA can do by offering bad certs.

it might be inconvenient for you to switch your systems to accomodate shorter expiries, but it's better to confront that inconvenience up front than for it to be in response to a security incident.

> Once we cross the threshold of "I absolutely have to automate everything or it's not viable to use TLS anymore", why do we care about providing anything beyond ~48 hours?

Well you see, they also want to be able to break your automation.

For example, maybe your automation generates a 1024 bit RSA certificate, and they've decided that 2048 bit certificates are the new minimum. That means your automation stops working until you fix it.

Doing this with 2-day expiry would be unpopular as the weekend is 2 days long and a lot of people in tech only work 5 days a week.

If the service becomes unavailable for 48 straight hours then every certificate expires and nothing works. You probably want a little more room for catastrophic infrastructure problems.

Load on the underlying infrastructure is a concern. The signing keys are all in HSMs and don't scale infinitely.

How does cycling out certificates more frequently reduce the load on HSMs?

It's all relative. A 47-day cycle increases the load, but a 48-hour cycle would increase it substantially more.

Much of the HSM load within a CA is OCSP signing, not subscriber cert issuance.

> Why not make it 30 seconds?

This is a ridiculous straw man.

> 48 hours. I am willing to bet money this threshold will never be crossed.

That's because it won't be crossed and nobody serious thinks it should.

Short certs are better, but there are trade-offs. For example, if cert infra goes down over the weekend, it would really suck. TBH, from a security perspective, something in the range of a couple of minutes would be ideal, but that runs up against practical reasons

- cert transparency logs and other logging would need to be substantially scaled up

- for the sake of everyone on-call, you really don't want anything shorter than a reasonable amount of time for a human to respond

- this would cause issues with some HTTP3 performance enhancing features

- thousands of servers hitting a CA creates load that outweighs the benefit of ultra short certs (which have diminishing returns once you're under a few days, anyways)

> This feels like much more of an ideological mission than a practical one

There are numerous practical reasons, as mentioned here by many other people.

Resisting this without good cause, like you have, is more ideological at this point.

Heh, working with a number of large companies I've seen most of them moving to internally signed certs on everything because of ever shortening expiration times. They'll have public certs on edge devices/load balancers but internal services with have internal CA signed certs with long expire times because of the number of crappy apps that make using certs a pain in the ass.

This is a desired outcome. The WebPKI ecosystem would really like it if everyone stopped depending on them for internal things because it's actually a pretty different set of requirements. Long-lived certs with an internal CA makes a lot of sense and is often more secure than using a public CA.

Our internally provided certs of various CAs have a TTL of 72 hours and should be renewed every 48 hours.

It's been a huge pain as we have encountered a ton of bugs and missing features in libraries and applications to reload certs like this. And we have some really ugly workarounds in place, because some applications place a "reload a consul client" on the same level of "reload all config, including opening new sockets, adjusting socket parameters, doing TCP connection handover" - all to rebuild a stateless client throwing a few parameters at a standard http client. But oh well.

But I refuse to back down. Reload your certs and your secrets. If we encounter a situation in which we have to mass-revoke and mass-reissue internal certs, it'll be easy for those who do. I don't have time for everyone else.

Browsers don't design for internal use though. They insist on HTTPS for various things that are intranet only, such as some browser APIs, PWAs, etc

Desired by who?

There’s nothing stopping Apple and Google from issuing themselves certificates every 10 minutes. I get no value for doing this. Building out or expanding my own PKI for my company or setting up the infrastructure to integrate with Digicert or whomever gets me zero security and business value, just cost and toil.

Revocation is most often an issue when CAs fuck up. So now we collectively need to pay to cover their rears.

What do you mean “WebPKI … would like”. The browser vendors want one thing (secure, ubiquitous, etc), the CAs want a very different thing (expensive, confusing, etc)…

Problem is browsers will most likely follow the enforcement of short certificates so internal sites will be affected as well.

Non browser things usually don’t care even if cert is expired or trusted.

So I expect people still to use WebPKI for internal sites.

I just got a flashback to trying to automate the certificate issuance process for some ESRI ArcGIS product that used an RPC configuration API over HTTPS to change the certificate.

So yes, you had to first ignore the invalid self-signed certificate while using HTTPS with a client tool that really, really didn't want to ignore the validity issue, then upload a valid certificate, restart the service... which would terminate the HTTPS connection with an error breaking your script in a different not-fun way, and then reconnect... at some unspecified time later to continue the configuration.

Fun times...

> I've seen most of them moving to internally signed certs

Isn't this a good default? No network access, no need for a public certificate, no need for a certificate that might be mistakenly trusted by a public (non-malicious) device, no need for a public log for the issued certificate.

Yes, but it is a lot more work to run an internal CA and distribute that CA cert to all the corporate clients. In the past getting a public wildcard cert was the path of least resistance for internal sites - no network access needed, and you aren't leaking much info into the public log. That is changing now, and like you said it is probably a change for the better.

I’ve unfortunately seen the opposite - internal apps are now back to being deployed over VPN and HTTP

I would love to do that for my homelab, but not all docker containers trust root certs from the system so getting it right would have been a bigger challenge than dns hacking to get a valid certificate for something that can’t be accessed from outside the network.

I am not willing to give credentials to alter my dns to a program. A security issue there would be too much risk.

> but internal services with have internal CA signed certs with long expire times because of the number of crappy apps that make using certs a pain in the ass.

Introduce them to the idea of having something like Caddy sit in front of apps solely for the purpose of doing TLS termination... Caddy et al can update the certs automatically.

Unless they are web/tech companies they aren't doing that. Banks, finance, large manufacturing are all terminating at F5's and AVI's. I'm pretty sure those update certs just fine, but it's not really what I do these days so I don't have a direct answer.

You now have to build and self-shot a complete CA/PKI.

Or request a certificate over the public internet, for an internal service. Your hostname must be exposed to the web and will be publicly visible in transparency reports.

I’ve always felt a major benefit of an internal CA is making it easy to have very sort TTLs

Or very long ones. I often generate 10 year certs because then I don't have to worry about renewing them for the lifetime of the hardware.

I'm surprised there is no authorization-certificate-based challenge type for ACME yet. That would make ACME practical to use in microsegmented networks.

The closest thing is maybe described (but not shown) in these posts: https://blog.daknob.net/workload-mtls-with-acme/ https://blog.daknob.net/acme-end-user-client-certificates/

At this point I wish we could just get all our clients to say "self-signed is fine if you're connecting to a .LOCAL domain name". https is intrinsically useful over raw http, but the overhead of setting up centralized certs for non-public domains is just dumb.

Give us a big global *.local cert we can all cheat with, so I don't have to blast my credentials in the clear when I log into my router's admin page.

this is exactly what I do because mongo and TLS is enough of a headache. I am not dealing with rotating certificates regularly on top of that for endpoints not exposed to the internet.

Yep letsencrypt is great for public-facing web servers but for stuff that isn't a web server or doesn't allow outside queries none of that "easy" automation works.

Haa, yes ! We have that, too ! Accepted warning in browsers ! curl -k ! verify=False ! Glorious future to the hacking industry !

As I said in another thread, basically that will kill any possibility to do your own CA for your own subdomain. Only the big one embedded in browser will have the receive to have their own CA certificate with whatever period they want...

And in term of security, I think that it is a double edged sword:

- everyone will be so used to certificates changing all the time, and no certificate pinning anymore, so the day were China, a company or whoever serve you a fake certificate, you will be less able to notice it

- Instead of having closed systems, readonly, having to connect outside and update only once per year or more to update the certificates, you will have now all machines around the world that will have to allow quasi permanent connections to random certificate servers for the updating the system all the time. If ever Digicert or Letsencrypt server, or the "cert updating client" is rooted or has a security issue, most servers around the world could be compromised in a very very short time.

As a side note, I'm totally laughing at the following explanation in the article:

   47 days might seem like an arbitrary number, but it’s a simple cascade:
   - 47 days = 1 maximal month (31 days) + 1/2 30-day month (15 days) + 1 day wiggle room

So, 47 is not arbitrary, but 1 month, + 1/2 month, + 1 day are not arbitrary values...

> everyone will be so used to certificates changing all the time, and no certificate pinning anymore, so the day were China, a company or whoever serve you a fake certificate, you will be less able to notice it

I'm a computing professional in the tiny slice of internet users that actually understands what a cert is, and I never look at a cert by hand unless it's one of my own that I'm troubleshooting. I'm sure there are some out there who do (you?), but they're a minority within a minority—the rest of us just rely on the automated systems to do a better job at security than we ever could.

At a certain point it is correct for systems engineers to design around keeping the average-case user more secure even if it means removing a tiny slice of security from the already-very-secure power users.

>As I said in another thread, basically that will kill any possibility to do your own CA for your own subdomain.

like, private CA? All of these restrictions are only applied for certificates issued under the webtrust program. Your private CA can still issue 100 year certificates.

Let's suppose that I'm a competitor of Google and Amazon, and I want to have my Public root CA for mydomain.com to offer my clients subdomains like s3.customer1.mydomain.com, s3.customer2.mydomain.com,...

No. Chrome flat out rejects certificates that expire more than 13 months away, last time I tried.

Certificate pinning to public roots or CAs is bad. Do not do it. You have no control over the CA or roots, and in many cases neither does the CA - they may have to change based on what trust-store operators say. Pinning to public CAs or roots or leaf certs, pseudo-pinning (not pinning to a key or cert specifically, but expecting some part of a certificate DN or extension to remain constant), and trust-store limiting are all bad, terrible, no-good practices that cause havoc whenever they are implemented.

Ok, but what's the alternative?

Support for cert and CA pinning is in a state that is much better than I thought it will be, at least for mobile apps. I'm impressed by Apple's ATS.

Yet, for instance, you can't pin a CA for any domain, you always have to provide it up front to audit, otherwise your app may not get accepted.

Doesn't this mean that it's not (realistically) possible to create cert pinning for small solutions? Like homelabs or app vendors that are used by onprem clients?

We'll keep abusing PKI for those use cases.

> 47 [is?] arbitrary, but 1 month, + 1/2 month, + 1 day are not arbitrary values...

Not related to certificates specifically, and the specific number of days is in no way a security risk, but it reminded me of NUMS generators. If you find this annoyingly arbitrary, you may also enjoy: <https://github.com/veorq/numsgen>. It implements this concept:

> [let's say] one every billion values allows for a backdoor. Then, I may define my constant to be H(x) for some deterministic PRNG H and a seed value x. Then I proceed to enumerate "plausible" seed values x until I find one which implies a backdoorable constant. I can begin by trying out all Bible verses, excerpts of Shakespeare works, historical dates, names of people and places... because for all of them I can build a story which will make the seed value look innocuous

From http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/16364/why-do-nothi...

> As I said in another thread, basically that will kill any possibility to do your own CA for your own subdomain

Only if browsers enforce the TLS requirements for private CAs. Usually, browsers exempt user or domain controlled CAs from all kinds of requirements, like certificate transparancy log requirements. I doubt things will be different this time.

If they do decide to apply those limits, you can run an ACME server for your private CA and point certbot or whatever ACME client you prefer at it to renew your internal certificates. Caddy can do this for you with a couple of lines of config: https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/acme_serve...

Funnily enough, Caddy defaults to issueing 12 hour certificates for its local CA deployment.

> no certificate pinning anymore

Why bother with public certificate authorities if you're hardcoding the certificate data in the client?

> Instead of having closed systems, readonly, having to connect outside and update only once per year or more to update the certificates, you will have now all machines around the world that will have to allow quasi permanent connections to random certificate servers for the updating the system all the time.

Those hosts needed a bastion host or proxy of sorts to connect to the outside yearly, so they can still do that today. But I don't see the advantage of using the public CA infrastructure in a closed system, might as well use the Microsoft domain controller settings you probably already use in your network to generate a corporate CA and issue your 10 year certificates if you're in control of the network.

> everyone will be so used to certificates changing all the time, and no certificate pinning anymore

Browser certificate pinning is deprecated since 2018. No current browsers support HPKP.

There are alternatives to pinning, DNS CAA records, monitoring CT logs.

Cert pinning is a very common practice for mobile apps. I'm not a fan of it, but it's how things are today. Seems likely that that will have to change with shorter cert lifetimes.

If you're in a position to pin certs, aren't you in a position to ignore normal CAs and just keep doing that?

I really wish encryption and identity weren't so tightly coupled in certificates. If I've issued a certificate, I _always_ care about encryption, but sometimes do not care about identity.

For those times when I only care about encryption, I'm forced to take on the extra burden that caring about identity brings.

Pet peeve.

There's minimal security in an unauthenticated encrypted connection, because an attacker can just MITM it.

Trust On First Use is the normal thing for these situations.

TOFU equates to "might as well never ask" for most users. Just like Windows UAC prompts.

There is a security model where MITM is not viable - and separating that specific threat from that of passive eavesdropping is incredibly useful.

MITM scenarios are more common on the 2025 Internet than passive attacks are.

I mean, we do TOFU for SSH server keys* and nobody really seems to bat an eye at that. Today if you want "insecure but encrypted" on the web the main way to go is self-signed which is both more annoying and less secure than TOFU for the same kind of use case. Admittedly, this is a little less concerning of an issue thanks to ACME providers. (But still annoying, especially for local development and intranet.)

*I mistakenly wrote "certificate" here initially. Sorry.

SSH TOFU is also deeply problematic, which is why cattle fleet operators tend to use certificates and not piecewise SSH keys.

ssh server certificates should not be TOFU, the point of SSH certs is so you can trust the signing key.

TOFU on ssh server keys... it's still bad, but less people are interested in intercepting ssh vs tls.

You don't have to TOFU SSH server keys, there is a DNSSEC option, or you can transfer the keys via a secure path, or you can sign the keys with a CA.

>I mean, we do TOFU for SSH server certificates and nobody really seems to bat an eye at that.

Mostly because ssh isn't something most people (eg. your aunt) uses, and unlike with https certificates, you're not connecting to a bunch of random servers on a regular basis.

TOFU is not less secure than using a certificate authority.

Both defend against attackers the other cannot. In particular, the number of machines, companies and government agencies you have to trust in order to use a CA is much higher.

How is an attacker going to MITM an encrypted connection they don't have the keys for, without having rogue DNS or something similar, i.e. faking the actual target?

It's an unauthenticated encrypted connection, so there's no way for you to know whose keys you're using. The attacker can just tell you "Hi, I'm the server you're looking for. Here's my key." and your client will establish a nice secure, encrypted connection to the malicious attacker's computer. ;)

They MITM the key exchange step at the beginning, and now they do have the keys. The thing that prevents this in TLS is the chain of signatures asserting identity.

Connections never start as encrypted, they always start as plain text. There are multiple ways of impersonating an IP even if you don't control DNS, especially if you are in the same local network.

I disagree. Think about every time you use a service (website, email, etc.) you've used before via a network you don't trust (e.g. free WiFi).

On the other hand providing the option may give a false sense of security. I think the main reason SSH isn't MitM'd all over the place is it's a pretty niche service and very often you do have a separate authentication method by sending your public key over HTTPS.

When I use a service over TLS on a network I don't trust, the premise is that I only will trust the connection if it has a certificate from a handful of companies trusted by the people who wrote the software I'm using (my browser/client and/or my operating system) to only issue said certificates to people who are supposed to have them (which these days is increasingly defined to be "who are in control of the DNS for the domain name at a global level", for better or worse, not that everyone wants to admit that).

But like, no: the free Wi-Fi I'm using can't, in fact, MITM the encryption used by my connection... it CAN do a bunch of other shitty things to me that undermine not only my privacy but even undermine many of the things people expect to be covered by privacy (using traffic analysis on the size, timing, or destination of the packets that I'm sending), but the encryption itself isn't subject to the failure mode of SSH.

> I disagree. Think about every time you use a service (website, email, etc.) you've used before via a network you don't trust (e.g. free WiFi).

Hm? The reason I do use those services over a network I don't trust is because they're wrapped in authenticated, encrypted channels. The authenticated encryption happens at a layer above the network because I don't trust the network.

But isn't that exactly the previous posters point? Free WiFI someone can just MITM your connection, you would never know and you think its encrypted. Its the worst possible outcome. At least when there's no encryption browsers can tell the user to be careful.

In what situation would you want to encrypt something but not care about the identity of the entity with the key to decrypt it? That seems like a very niche use case to me.

Because TLS doesn't promise you very much about the entity which holds the key. All you really know is that they they control some DNS records.

You might be visiting myfavouriteshoes.com (a boutique shoe site you have been visiting for years), but you won't necessarily know if the regular owner is away or even if the business has been sold.

It tells you the entity which holds the key is the actual owner of myfavouriteshoes.com, and not just a random guy operating the free Wi-Fi hotspot at the coffee shop you're visiting. If you don't care about that then why even bother with encryption in the first place?

at least it's not evil-government-proxy.com that decided to mitm you and look at your favorite shoes.

It happens often enough that it would be useful to me. Mostly it's when developing something. I'm the one creating the cert, I'm the one putting it in place, I'm in control of the DNS, place I'm connecting to, and it's all local. There is an insignificant change that someone could do something nasty to that connection.

Seems logical.

If we encrypt everything we don't need AuthN/Z.

Encrypt locally to the target PK. Post a link to the data.

All our door locks suck, but everyone has a door lock.

The goal isn't to make everything impossible to break. The goal is to provide Just Enough security to make things more difficult. Legally speaking, sniffing and decrypting encrypted data is a crime, but sniffing and stealing unencrypted data is not.

That's an important practical distinction that's overlooked by security bozos.

Having them always coupled disincentivizes bad ISP's from MITM the connection.

I agree, there needs to be a TLS without certificates. Pre-shared secrets would be much more convenient in many scenarios.

How about TLS without CAs? See DANE. If only web browsers would support it.

DANE is a TLS with too-big-to-fail CAs that are tied to the top-level domains they own, and can't be replaced.

Separation between CAs and domains allows browsers to get rid of incompetent and malicious CAs with minimal user impact.

Isn't this excatly the reason why LetsEncrypt was brought to life?

Isn't identity the entire point of certificates? Why use certificates if you only care about encryption?

If you have the inverse requirement = identity and no encryption I heartily recommend: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289

I want a middle ground. Identity verification is useful for TLS, but I really wish there was no reliance on ultimately trusted third parties for that. Maybe put some sort of identity proof into DNS instead, since the whole thing relies on DNS anyway.

Makes it trivial for your DNS provider to MITM you, and you can't even use certificate transparency to detect it.

You can use multiple DNS providers at once to catch that situation. You can have some sort of signing scheme where each authoritative server would sign something in turn to establish a chain of trust up to the root servers. You can use encrypted DNS, even if it is relying on traditional TLS certificates, but it can also use something different for identity verification, like having you use a config file with the public key embedded in it, or a QR code, instead of just an address.

If web browsers supported DANE, we would not need CAs for encryption.

DNSSEC is just a shittier PKI with CAs that are too big to ever fail.

It is, but since we rely on DNS anyway, no matter what, and your DNS provider can get a certificate from Let's Encrypt for your site, without asking you, there's merit to combining them. It doesn't add any security to have PKI separate from DNS.

However, we could use some form of Certificate Transparency that would somehow work with DANE.

Also it still protects you from everyone who isn't your DNS provider, so it's valuable if you only need a medium level of security.

This is great news. This would blow a hole in two interesting places where leaf-level certificate pinning is relied upon:

1. mobile apps.

2. enterprise APIs. I dealt with lots of companies that would pin the certs without informing us, and then complain when we'd rotate the cert. A 47-day window would force them to rotate their pins automatically, making it even worse of a security theater. Or hopefully, they switch rightly to CAA.

Giving me PTSD for working in healthcare.

Health Systems love pinning certs, and we use an ALB with 90 day certs, they were always furious.

Every time I was like "we can't change it", and "you do trust the CA right?", absolute security theatre.

Do you (or anyone) recommend any text based resources laying out the state of enterprise TLS management in 2025?

It’s become a big part of my work and I’ve always just had a surface knowledge to get me by. Assume I work in a very large finance or defense firm.

Isn't it usually the server's public key that's pinned? The key pair isn't regenerated when you renew the certificate.

Typical guidance is to pin the CA or intermediate, because in case of a key compromise, you're going to need to generate a new key.

You should really generate a new key for each certificate, in case the old key is compromised and you don't know about it.

What would really be nice, but is unlikely to happen would be if you could get a constrained CA certificate issued for your domain and pin that, then issue your own short term certificates from there. But if those are wide spread, they'd need to be short dated too, so you'd need to either pin the real CA or the public key and we're back to where we were.

I've said it up-thread, but never ever never never pin to anything public. Don't do it. It's bad. You, and even the CA have no control over the certificates and cannot rely on them remaining in any way constant. Don't do it. If you must pin, pin to private CAs you control. Otherwise, don't do it. Seriously. Don't.

Dealing with enterprise is going to be fun, we work with a lot of car companies around the world. A good chunk of them love to whitelist by thumbprint. That is going to be fun for them.

> As a certificate authority, one of the most common questions we hear from customers is whether they’ll be charged more to replace certificates more frequently. The answer is no. Cost is based on an annual subscription […]

(emphasis added)

Pump the brakes there, digicert. Price is based on an annual subscription. CA costs will actually go up an infinitesimal amount, but they’re already nearly zero to begin with. Running a CA has got to be one of the easiest rackets in the world.

Costs to buy certs will not materially change. Costs to manage certs will increase.

I see that there is a timeline for progressive shortening, so if anyone has any "inside baseball" on this, I'm very curious to know:

Given that the overarching rationale here is security, what made them stop at 47 days? If the concern is _actually_ security, allowing a compromised cert to exist for a month and a half is I guess better than 398 days, but why is 47 days "enough"?

When will we see proposals for max cert lifetimes of 1 week? Or 1 day? Or 1 hour? What is the lower limit of the actual lifespan of a cert and why aren't we at that already? What will it take to get there?

Why are we investing time and money in hatching schemes to continually ratchet the lifespan of certs back one more step instead of addressing the root problems, whatever those are?

The root problem is certificate lifetimes are too long relative to the speed at which domains change, and the speed at which the PKI needs to change.

So the assumption here is that somehow your private key is easier to compromise than whatever secret/mechanism you use to provision certs?

Yeah not sure about that one...

Off-topic: What is a good learning resource about TLS?

I've read the basics on Cloudflare's blog and MDN. But at my job, I encountered a need to upload a Let's encrypt public cert to the client's trusted store. Then I had to choose between Let's encrypt's root and intermediate certs, between key types RSA and ECDSA. I made it work, but it would be good to have an idea of what I'm doing. For example why root RSA key worked even though my server uses ECDSA cert. Before I added the root cert to a trusted store, clients used to add fullchain.pem from the server and it worked too — why?

I have a bunch of useful resources, most of which are free:

- If you're looking for a concise (yet complete) guide: https://www.feistyduck.com/library/bulletproof-tls-guide/

- OpenSSL Cookbook is a free ebook: https://www.feistyduck.com/library/openssl-cookbook/

- SSL/TLS and PKI history: https://www.feistyduck.com/ssl-tls-and-pki-history/

- Newsletter: https://www.feistyduck.com/newsletter/

- If you're looking for something comprehensive and longer, try my book Bulletproof TLS and PKI: https://www.feistyduck.com/books/bulletproof-tls-and-pki/

I learned a lot from TLS Mastery by Michael W. Lucas.

Thanks, looks exactly like what I wanted

I wrote a list of resources that helped me at https://www.bbkane.com/blog/learn-ssl/

Thx. For one API in my company, there is only root and intermediate certificates are present in the jks file but the leaf certificate is not. Would encryption work without a leaf certificate?

In another instance to connect to a server, only the root certificate is present in the trust store. Does it mean encryption can be performed with just the root certificate.

> SSL is one of those weird niche subjects that no one learns until they run into a problem

Yep, that me.

Thanks for the blog post!

Use ECDSA if you can, since it reduces the size of the handshake on the wire (keys are smaller). Don’t bake in intermediate certs unless you have a very good reason.

No idea why the RSA key worked even though the server used RSA — maybe check into the recent cross-signing shenanigans that Let’s Encrypt had to pull to extend support for very old Android versions.

I've been reading a little since then, and I think it worked with RSA root cert because this cert was a trust anchor of the Chain of Trust of my server's ECDSA certificate.

Curious why you wouldn't have a Q and A with AI?

If the information is relatively unchanged and the details well documented why not ask questions to fill in the gaps?

The Socratic method has been the best learning tool for me and I'm doubling my understanding with the LLMs.

I think this method works best when you can verify the answer. So it has to be either a specific type of question (a request to generate code, which you can then run and test), or you have to know enough about the subject to be able to spot mistakes.

Can someone point me to specific exploits that this key rotation schedule would have stopped?

It seems to me like compromised keys are rare. It also seems like 47 days is low enough to be inconvenient, but not low enough to prevent significant numbers of people from being compromised if there is a compromised key.

> Can someone point me to specific exploits that this key rotation schedule would have stopped?

It's not only key mismanagement that is being mitigated. You also have to prove more frequently that you have control of the domain or IP in the certificate.

In essence it brings a working method of revocation to WebPKI.

> but not low enough to prevent significant numbers of people from being compromised if there is a compromised key.

Compared to a year?

> You also have to prove more frequently that you have control of the domain or IP in the certificate.

That doesn't particularly matter; if someone takes over the domain but doesn't have a leaked key, they can't sign requests for the domain with my cert. It takes a leaked key for this to turn into a vulnerability.

On the other hand, anyone that owns the domain can get a perfectly valid cert any time, no need to exploit anything. And given that nobody actually looks at the details of the cert owner in practice, that means that if you lose the domain, the new owner is, treated as legit. No compromises needed.

The only way to prevent that is to pin the cert, which this short rotation schedule makes harder, or pin the public key and be very careful to not regenerate your keys when you submit a new CSR.

In short: Don't lose your domain.

> Compared to a year?

Typically these kinds of things have an exponential dropoff, so most of the exploited folks would be soon after the compromise. I don't think that shortening to this long a period, rather than (say) 24h would make a material difference.

But, again, I'm also not sure how many people were compromised via anything that this kind of rotation would prevent. It seems like most exploits depend on someone either losing control over the domain (again, don't do that; the current issuance model doesn't handle that), or just being phished via a valid cert on an unrelated domain.

Do you have concrete examples of anyone being exploited via key mismanagement (or not proving often enough that they have control over a domain)?

I just downloaded one of DigiCert's CRLs and it was half a megabyte. There are probably thousands of revoked certificates in there. If you're not checking CRLs, and a lot of non-browser clients (think programming languages, software libraries, command-line tools, etc.) aren't, then you would trust one of those certificates if it was presented to you. With certificate lifetimes of 47 days instead of a year, 87% of those revoked certificates become unusable regardless of CRL checking.

> That doesn't particularly matter; if someone takes over the domain but doesn't have a leaked key, they can't sign requests for the domain with my cert. It takes a leaked key for this to turn into a vulnerability.

It does, if someone gets temporary access, issues a certificate and then keeps using it to impersonate something. Now the malicious actor has to do it much more often, significantly increasing chances of detection.

The 47 days are (mostly) irrelevant when it comes to compromised keys. The certificate will be revoked by the CA at most 24 hours after compromise becomes known, so a shorter cert isn't really "more secure" than a longer one.

At least, that's what the rules say. In practice CAs have a really hard time saying no to a multi-week extension because a too-big-to-fail company running "critical infrastructure" isn't capable of rotating their certs.

Short cert duration forces companies to automate cert renewal, and with automation it becomes trivial to rotate certs in an acceptable time frame.

Is there an actual issue with widespread cert theft? That seems like the primary valid reason to do this, not forcing automation.

Let's Encrypt dropped support for OCSP. CRL doesn't scale well. Short lived certificate probably are a way to avoid certificate revocation quirks.

It's a real shame. OCSP with Must-Staple seemed like the perfect solution to this, it just never got widespread support.

I suppose technically you can get approximately the same thing with 24-hour certificate expiry times. Maybe that's where this is ultimately heading. But there are issues with that design too. For example, it seems a little at odds with the idea of Certificate Transparency logs having a 24-hour merge delay.

Also certificate transparency is moving to a new standard (sunlight CT) that has immediate merges. Google requires maximum merge delay to be 1 minute or less, but they've said on google groups that they expect merges to be way faster.

The log is not really for real time use. It’s to catch CA non-compliance.

I think it's more about revocation not working in practice. So the only solution is a short TTL.

I suspect it's to limit how long a malicious or compromised CA can impact security.

Equivalently, it also maximizes the number of sites impacted when a CA is compromised.

It also lowers the amount of time it’d take for a top-down change to compromise all outstanding certificates. (Which would seen paranoid if this wasn’t 2025.)

Mostly this. Today of a big CA is caught breaking the rules, actually enforcing repairs (eg prompt revocation ) is a hard pill to swallow.

I think op is asking has there been many real case scenarios in practice that pushed for this change?

I guess the main reason behind this move is platform capitalism. It's an easy way to cut off grassroots internet.

If that were true, we would not have Let's Encrypt and tools which can give us certificates in 30 seconds flat once we prove ownership.

The real reason was Snowden. The jump in HTTPS adoption after the Snowden leaks was a virtual explosion; and set HTTPS as the standard for all new services. From there, it was just the rollout. (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/10-years-after-snowden...)

(Edit because I'm posting too fast, for the reply):

> How do you enjoy being dependent on a 3rd party (even a well intentioned one) for being on the internet?

Everyone is reliant on a 3rd party for the internet. It's called your ISP. They also take complaints and will shut you down if they don't like what you're doing. If you are using an online VPS, you have a second 3rd party, which also takes complaints, can see everything you do, and will also shut you down if they don't like what you're doing; and they have to, because they have an ISP to keep happy themselves. Networks integrating with 3rd party networks is literally the definition of the internet.

How do you enjoy being dependent on a 3rd party (even a well intentioned one) for being on the internet?

Let's Encrypt... Cloudflare... useful services right? Or just another barrier to entry because you need to set up and maintain them?

I dunno. Self-hosting w/o automation was feasible. Now you have to automate. It will lead to a huge amount of link rot or at least something very similar. There will be solutions but setting up a page e2e gets more and more complicated. In the end you want a service provider who takes care of it. Maybe not the worst thing, but what kind of security issues are we talking about? There is still certificate revocation...

How does this cut off the grassroots internet?

It makes end to end responsibility more cumbersome. There were days people just stored MS Frontpage output on their home server.

There are very convenient tools to do https easily these days, e.g. Caddy. You can use it to reverse proxy any http server and it will do the cert stuff for you automatically.

Ofc, but you have to be quite techsavy to know this and to set this up. It's also cumbersome in many low-tech situations. There is certificate revocation, I would really like to see the threat model here. I am not even sure if automation helps or just shifts the threat vector to certificate issuing.

This change will have a steady roll-out, but if you want to get ahead of the curve then Let's Encrypt will be offering 6 day certs as an option soon.

https://letsencrypt.org/2025/02/20/first-short-lived-cert-is...

Don't forget the lede buried here - you'll need to re-validate control over your DNS names more frequently too. Many enterprises are used to doing this once-per-year today, but by the time 47-day certs roll around, you'll be re-validating all of your domain control every 10 days (more likely every week).

So does this mean all of our Chromecasts are going to stop working again once this takes effect since (judging by Google's response during the week long Chromecast outage earlier this year) Chromecast is run by a skeleton crew and won't have the resources to automate certificate renewal?

Justification:

> The ballot argues that shorter lifetimes are necessary for many reasons, the most prominent being this: The information in certificates is becoming steadily less trustworthy over time, a problem that can only be mitigated by frequently revalidating the information.

> The ballot also argues that the revocation system using CRLs and OCSP is unreliable. Indeed, browsers often ignore these features. The ballot has a long section on the failings of the certificate revocation system. Shorter lifetimes mitigate the effects of using potentially revoked certificates. In 2023, CA/B Forum took this philosophy to another level by approving short-lived certificates, which expire within 7 days, and which do not require CRL or OCSP support.

Personally I don't really buy this argument. I don't think the web sites that most people visit (especially highly-sensitive ones like for e-mail, financial stuff, a good portion of shopping) change or become "less trustworthy" that quickly.

The "less trustworthy" refers to key compromise, not the e-shop going rogue and start scamming customers or whatever.

Okay, the key is compromised: that means they can MITM the trust relationship. But with modern algorithms you have forward security, so even if you've sniffed/captured the traffic it doesn't help.

And I would argue that MITMing communications is a lot hard for (non-nation state) attackers than compromising a host, so trust compromise is a questionable worry.

>And I would argue that MITMing communications is a lot hard for (non-nation state) attackers than compromising a host, so trust compromise is a questionable worry.

By that logic, we don't really need certificates, just TOFU.

Nobody forces you to change your key for renewals.

First impression: with automation and short lived certificates, the Certifying Authorities become similar to Identity Providers / OpenID Provider in openid / openid-connect. The certificates are tokens.

And significant part of security is concentrated around the way Certifying Authorities validate the domain ownership. (So called challenges).

Next, maybe clients can run those challenges directly, instead of relying onto certificates? For example, when connecting a server, client client sends two unique values, and the server must create DNS record <unique-val-1>.server.com with record value of the <unique-val-2>. Client check that such record is created and thus the server has proven it controls the domain name.

Auth through DNS, that's what it is. We will just need to speed up the DNS system.

This will not work as any attacker that can MITM the client (likely scenario for end-users), can also MITM this "certificate issuing" setup and issue their own cert.

The reason an attacker can't MITM Let's Encrypt (or similar ACME issuers) is because they request the challenge-response from multiple locations, making sure a simple MITM against them doesn't work.

A fully DNS based "certificate setup" already exists: DANE, but that requires DNSSEC, which isn't wildly used.

You are right that the scheme I described is vulnerable. Even without MITM. Just fakeserver.com upon receiving request from client sends equal request to server.com, which creates the needed DNS record and thus real client is "convinced" that fakeserver.com controls DNS.

But that just a nuance that could be fixed. I elaborate little more on what I mean in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43712754

Thx for pointing to DANE.

That does not work as DNS is insecure. DNSSEC is not there and may never will.

But this is already basically how Let's Encrypt challenges certificate applicants over ACME DNS01 [0].

I would be more concerned about the number of certificates that would need to be issued and maintained over their lifecycle - which now scales with the number of unique clients challenging your server (or maybe I misunderstand, and maybe there aren't even certificates any more in this scheme).

Not to mention the difficulties of assuring reasonable DNS response times and fresh, up-to-date results when querying a global eventually consistent database with multiple levels of caching...

[0] https://letsencrypt.org/docs/challenge-types/#dns-01-challen...

In the scheme I descrubed where client directly runs challenges the certificates are not issued at all.

I am not saying this scheme is really practical currently.

That's just an imaginary situation coming to mind, illustrating the increased importance of domain ownership validation procedures used by Certifying Authorities. Essentially the security now comes down to the domain ownership validation.

Also a correction. The server not simply puts <unique-val-2>, it puts sha256(<unique-val-2> || '.' || <fingerprint of the public key of the account>).

Yes, the ACME protocol uses some account keys. Private key signs a requests for new cert, and public key fingerprint during domain ownership validation confirms that the challenge response was intended for that specific account.

I am not suggesting ACME can be trivially broken.

I just realized that risks of TLS certs breaking is not just risk of public key crypto being broken, but also includes the risks of domain ownership validation protocols.

And would be replacing the CA PKI with an even more centralized PKI.

I don’t see any issue here. I already automate with ACME so rotating certificates on an earlier basis is okay. This should be like breathing for app and service developers and infrastructure teams.

Side note: I wonder how much pressure this puts on providers such as LetsEncrypt, especially with the move to validate IPs. And more specifically IPv6…

Because there are lots of companies, large and small, which haven't gotten that far. Lots of legacy sites/services/applications.

I don't disagree with you that it should be super common. But it's surprisingly not in many businesses. Heck, Okta (nominally a large security company) still sends out notifications every time they change certificates and publishes a copy of their current correct certs in github: https://github.com/okta/okta-pki - How they do the actual rotation? No idea, but... I'd guess it's not automatic with that level of manual notification/involvement. (Happy to be proven wrong though).

I'm sure this will be buried, but SSL is supposed to provide encryption. That's it.

Self-signed custom certs also does that. But those are demonized.

Also SSL also tries to define a ip-dns certification of ownership, kind of.

There's also a distinct difference between 'this cert expired last week' and 'this cert doesn't exist' and mitm attack. Expired? Just give a warning, not a scare screen. MITM? Sure give a big scary OHNOPE screen.

But, yeah, 47 days is going to wreck havok on network and weird devices.

If there was no IP/DNS ownership verification, how would you even know you had been MITMed? You think the attacker is going to set a flag to let you know the certificate is fake?

The only real alternative to checking who signed a certificate is checking the certificate's fingerprint hash instead. With self-signed certificates, this is the only option. However, nobody does this. When presented with an unknown certificate, people will just blindly trust it. So self-signed certificates at scale are very susceptible to MITM. And again, you're not going to know it happened.

Encryption without authentication prevents passive snooping but not active and/or targeted attacks. And the target may not be you, it may be the other side. You specifically might not be worth someone's time, but your bank and all of its other customers too, probably is.

OCSP failed. CRLs are not always being checked. Shorter expiry largely makes up for the lack of proper revocation. But expiration must consequently be treated as no less severe than revocation.

True, I get where you're coming from, but I think there's more problems even in those implied answers.

Homoglyph attacks are a thing. And I can pay $10 for a homoglyph name. No issues. I can get a webserver on a VM and point DNS. From there I can get a Letsencrypt. Use Nginx to point towards real domain. Install a mailserver and send out spoofed mails. You can also even set up SPF/DKIM/DMARC and have a complete attested chain.

And its all based on a fake DNS, using nothing more than things like a Cyrillic 'o'.

And, the self-signed issue is also what we see with SSH. And it mostly just works too.

I know this thread is over, but it's important to understand that it's the browsers who have all the power in CABF and they were the drivers behind this change. Apple proposed it and Google voted yes within minutes of the voting period opening. It was unanimous among CAs too (with 5 abstentions), and nobody really disagrees with it, but it was the browsers who started the initiative now. The article links to the vote thread: https://groups.google.com/a/groups.cabforum.org/g/servercert... And here's the CABF discussion before the vote: https://github.com/cabforum/servercert/pull/553/commits/69ce...

It wasn't just the browsers. Some CAs supported this for a long time, and even directly endorsed the ballot. You're not wrong about the browsers having 'the power', but then again - they are the representatives of billions of relying parties, so it's expected.

Question: Does anyone have a good solution for renewing letsencrypt certificates for websites hosted on multiple servers? Right now, I have one master server that the others forward the well-known requests too, and then I copy the certificate over when I'm done, but I'm wondering if there's a better way.

I use DNS verification for this then the server doesn't even need to be exposed to the internet.

And if changing the DNS entry is problematic, for example the DNS provider used doesn't have an API, you can redirect the challenge to another (sub)domain which can be hosted by a provider that has an API.

I've done this and it works very well. I had a Digital Ocean droplet so used their DNS service for the challenge domain.

https://letsencrypt.org/docs/challenge-types/#dns-01-challen...

I use dns01 in my homelab with step-ca. works like a charm, and it's my private certificate authority

We just use certbot on each server. Are you worried about the rate limit? LE rate limits based on the list of domains. So we send the request for the shared domain and the domain for each server instance. That makes each renew request unique per server for the purpose of the rate limit.

Orchestrate the renewal with Ansible - renew on the "master" server remotely but pull the new key material to your orchestrator and then push them to your server fleet. That's what I do. It's not "clean" or "ideal" to my tastes, but it works.

It also occurred to me that there's nothing(?) preventing you from concurrently having n valid certificates for a particular hostname, so you could just enroll distinct certificates for each host. Provided the validation could be handled somehow.

The other option would maybe be doing DNS-based validation from a single orchestrator and then pushing that result onto the entire fleet.

I copy the same certbot account settings and private key to all servers and they obtain the certs themselves.

It is a bit funny that LetsEncrypt has non-expiring private keys for their accounts.

There's a tool called "lsyncd" which watches for a file and syncs the changed file to other servers "within seconds".

I use this to sync users between small, experimental cluster nodes.

Some notes I have taken: https://notes.bayindirh.io/notes/System+Administration/Synci...

Have you tried certbot? Or if you want a turnkey solution, you may try Caddy or Traefik that have their own automated certificate generation utility.

getssl was written with a bit of a focus on this:

> Get certificates for remote servers - The tokens used to provide validation of domain ownership, and the certificates themselves can be automatically copied to remote servers (via ssh, sftp or ftp for tokens). The script doesn't need to run on the server itself. This can be useful if you don't have access to run such scripts on the server itself, e.g. if it's a shared server.

* https://github.com/srvrco/getssl

DNS verification.

Your 90-day snapshot backups will soon become 47-day backups. Take care!

???

Do people really backup their https certificates? Can't you generate a new one after restoring from backup?

This is going to be one of the obvious traps.

To care about stale certs on snapshots or the opposite?

(Shameless self-promotion) We set up our https://heiioncall.com/ monitoring to give our on-call rotation a non-critical “it can wait until Monday” alert when there are 14 days or less left on our SSL certificates, and a critical alert “do-not-disturb be damned” when 48 hours left until expiry. Because cert-manager got into some weird state once a few years ago, and I’d rather find out well in advance next time.

Edit: it’s configured under Trigger -> Outbound Probe -> “SSL Certificate Minimum Expiration Duration”

If this is causing you pain, certbot with Acme DNS challenge is pretty easy to set up to get you certs for your internal services. There are tools for many different dns providers like route53 or cloudflare.

I tend to have secondary scripts that checks if the cert in certbots dir is newer than whatever is installed for a service, and if so install it. Some services prefer the cert in certain formats, some services want to be reloaded to pick up a new cert etc, so I put that glue in my own script and run it from cron or a systemd timer.

Yeah, but the problem as I see it is not to renew the certs. Some systems becomes unstable or needs to reboot during installation of new certificates. I worked on systems where it takes hours to install and use new certificates.

The problem is more or less devices that do not support dns challenges or only support letsencrypt and not the acme protocol (to chain acme servers, etc)

What kind of devices are you thinking of? Like switches and other network gear?

It sure would be nice if we could actually fix dns.

To me I don't really care about the certificate lifetime, what I care about is the time between being allowed to renew and time until expiry.

Right now Let's Encrypt recommends renewing your 90d certificates every 60 days, which means that there is a 30 day window between recommended to renew and expiry. This feels relatively comfortable to me. A long vacation may be longer than 30 days but it is rare and there is probably other maintenance that you should be doing in this time (although likely routine like security updates rather than exceptional like figuring out why your certificate isn't renewing).

So if 47 days ends up meaning renew every 17 days and still have that 30 day buffer I would be quite happy. But what I fear is that they will recommend (and set rate limits based on) renewing every 30 days with a 17 day buffer which is getting a little short for comfort IMHO. While big organizations will have a 24h oncall and medium organizations will have many business hours to figure it out is sucks for individuals who what to go away for a few weeks without worrying about debugging their certificate renewal until they get home.

Daniel K Moran figured out the endgame:

"Therefore, the Lunar Bureau of the United Nations Peace Keeping Force DataWatch has created the LINK, the Lunar Information Network Key. There are currently nine thousand, four hundred and two Boards on Luna; new Boards must be licensed before they can rent lasercable access. Every transaction--every single transaction--which takes place in the Lunar InfoNet is keyed and tracked on an item-by-item basis. The basis of this unprecedented degree of InfoNet security is the Lunar Information Network Key. The Key is an unbreakable encryption device which the DataWatch employs to validate and track every user in the Lunar InfoNet. Webdancers attempting unauthorized access, to logic, to data, to communications facilities, will be punished to the full extent of the law."

from The Long Run (1989)

Your browser won't access a site without TLS; this is for your own protection. TLS certificates are valid for one TCP session. All certs are issued by an organization reporting directly to a national information security office; if your website isn't in compliance with all mandates, you stop getting certs.

After EFF Lets Encrypt made the change to disable reminder emails I decided I would be moving my personal blog from my VPS to AWS specifically. I just today made the time to make the move and 10 minutes after I find this.

I could have probably done more with Lets Encrypt automation to stay with my old VPS but given that all my professional work is with AWS its really less mental work to drop my old VPS.

Times they are a changing

Why not just automate your LetsEncrypt keys like literally everyone else does? It's free and you have to go out of your way to do it manually.

Or just pay Amazon, I guess. Easier than thinking.

A welcome change if it gives some vendors a kick up the behind to implement ACME.

There is no more choice. No one is going to buy from (example) GoDaddy if they have to login every 30 days to manually get a new certificate. Not when they can go to (example) digicert and it's all automatic.

It goes from a "rather nice to have" to "effectively mandatory".

I think GoDaddy supports ACME - but if you're using ACME you might as well use Let's Encrypt and stop paying for it.

> For this reason, and because even the 2027 changes to 100-day certificates will make manual procedures untenable, we expect rapid adoption of automation long before the 2029 changes.

Oh yes, vendors will update their legacy NAS/IPMI/whatever to include certbot. This change will have the exact opposite effect - expired self signed certificates everywhere on the most critical infrastructure.

I have automated IPMI certificate rotation set-up through Let's Encrypt and ACME via the Redfish API. And this is on 15 year old gear running HP iLO4. There's no excuse for not automating things.

People will just roll out almost forever-lasting certificates through their internal CA for all systems that are not publicly reachable.

> through their internal CA

Nope. People will create self-signed certs and tell people to just click "accept".

Old SysAdmin and InfoSec Admin perspective:

Dev guys think everything is solvable via code, but hardware guys know this isn't true. Hardware is stuck in fixed lifecycles and firmware is not updated by the vendors unless it has to be. And in many cases updated poorly. No hardware I've ever come across that supports SSL\TLS (and most do nowadays) offers any automation capability in updating certs. In most cases, certs are manually - and painfully - updated with esoteric CLI cantrips that require dancing while chanting to some ancient I.T. God for mercy because the process is poorly (if at all) documented and often broken. No API call or middelware is going to solve that problem unless the manufacturer puts it in. In particular, load balancers are some of the worst at cert management, and remember that not everyone uses F5 - there are tons of other cheaper and popular alternatives most of which are atrocious at security configuration management. It's already painful enough to manage certs in an enterprise and this 47 day lifecycle is going to break things. Hardware vendors are simply incompetent and slow to adapt to security changes. And not everyone is 100% in the cloud - most enterprises are only partially in that pool.

I think everybody involved knows about the likelihood that things are going to break at enterprise shops with super-expensive commercial middleboxes. They just don't care anymore. We ran a PKI that cared deeply about the concerns of admins for a decade and a half, and it was a fiasco. The coders have taken over, and things are better.

That's great for shops with Dev teams and in house developed platforms. Those shops are rare outside Silicon Valley and fortune 500s and not likely to increase beyond that. For the rest of us, we are at the mercy of off the shelf products and 3rd party platforms.

“Hardware vendors are simply incompetent and slow to adapt to security changes.”

Perhaps the new requirements will give them additional incentives.

Yeah, just like TLS 1.2 support. Don't even get me started on how that fiasco is still going.

Sounds like everything is solvable via code, and the hardware vendors just suck at it.

In a nutshell, yes. From a security perspective, look at Fortinet as an egregious example of just how bad. Palo Alto also has some serious internal issues.

not really, a lot of those middleware boxes are doing some form of ASIC offloading for TLS, and the PROM that loads the cert(s) are not rated for heavy writes… thus writing is slow, blocking, and will wear your hardware out.

The larger issue is actually our desire to deprecate cipher suites so rapidly though, those 2-3 year old ASICs that are functioning well become e-waste pretty quickly when even my blog gets a Qualys “D” rating after having an “A+” rating barely a year ago.

How much time are we spending on this? The NSA is literally already in the walls.

At the same time I don’t think it’s reasonable to make global cert decisions like this based on what some crappy manufacturer failed to implement in their firmware. The issue there is clearly the crap hardware (though the sysadmins that have to deal with it have my condolences)

The ultimate internet "kill switch": revoke all certificates. Modern browsers refuse to render the page.

Pretty sure this only refers to publicly trusted certs. What percentage of public certs are still being manually managed?

I've been in the cert automation industry for 8 years (https://certifytheweb.com) and I do still hear of manual work going on, but the majority of stuff can be automated.

For stuff that genuinely cannot be automated (are you sure you're sure) these become monthly maintenance tasks, something cert management tools are also now starting to help with.

We're planning to add tracking tasks for manual deployments to Certify Management Hub shortly (https://docs.certifytheweb.com/docs/hub/), for those few remaining items that need manual intervention.

Having short-lived certificates is good, replacing them too often is not. This is implemented trivially for single-host deployments which just run certbot or ACME each subdomains. But for sophisticated setups where a certificate for a domain (or multiple domains or a wildcard) must be shared across fleet of hosts, it is a burden.

There are no ready-made tools available to automate such deployments. Especially if a certificate must be the same for each of the hosts, fingerprint included. Having a single, authoritative certificate for a domain and its wildcard subdomains deployed everywhere is much simpler to monitor. It does not expose internal subdomains in certificate transparency logs.

Unfortunately, organizations (persons) involved in decisions, do not provide such tools in advance.

I agree. There should be a process in place for checking if changes are ready to be rolled out, and one of the checks should be a working prototype implementation, that is open source, that shows that running your systems can still be managed.

This sounds an awful lot like security theatre.

> The information in certificates is becoming steadily less trustworthy over time, a problem that can only be mitigated by frequently revalidating the information.

This is patently nonsensical. There is hardly any information in a certificate that matters in practice, except for the subject, the issuer, and the expiration date.

> Shorter lifetimes mitigate the effects of using potentially revoked certificates.

Sure, and if you're worried about your certificates being stolen and not being correctly revoked, then by all means, use a shorter lifetime.

But forcing shorter lifetimes on everyone won't end up being beneficial, and IMO will create a lot of pointless busywork at greater expense. Many issuers still don't support ACME.

I wonder how many forums run by the barely able are going to disappear or start charging.

I fairly regularly get cert expired problems because the admin is doing it as the yak shaving for a secondary hobby

Why would they start charging? Auto-renewing certificates with Let's Encrypt are easy to do.

as long as you only have a single server, or a DNS server that has an API.

Even certbot got deprecated, so my IRC network has to use some janky shell scripts to rotate TLS… I’m considering going back to traditional certs because I geo-balance the DNS which doesn’t work for letsencrypt.

The issue is actually that I have multiple domains handled multiple ways and they all need to be letsencrypt capable for it to work and generate a combined cert with SAN’s attached.

Getting a bit ridiculous.

Looks like a case where there are tradeoffs to be made, but the people with authority over the decision have no incentive to consider one side of the trade.

Why?

The logical endgame is 30 second certificates...

https://mathematicalcrap.com/2022/08/14/the-great-loyalty-oa...

"When they voiced objection, Captain Black replied that people who cared about security would not mind performing all the security theatre they had to. To anyone who questioned the effectiveness of the security theatre, he replied that people who really did owe allegiance to their employer would be proud to take performative actions as often as he forced them to. The more security theatre a person performed, the more secure he was; to Captain Black it was as simple as that."

Why bother with such a long staggered approach?

There should be 1 change from 365 to 47 days. This industry doesnt need constant changes, which will force everyone to automating renewals anyway.

Enterprises are like lobsters: You gotta crank the water temperature up slowly.

Thanks for the heads up. I will adjust my cron jobs to run every week instead of every month.

I need it more frequently to get more time in case there is an error as I tend to ignore the error e-mails for multiple weeks due to my fatigue from handling of various kinds of certificates.

Personally I also have an HTTP mirror for my more important projects when availability is more important than security of the connection.

This could be addressed in a more progressive way.

For example, EV carts had the green bar that was a soft way to promote their presence/use over the normal ones. That bar, started as a strong evidence on the url box and lost that look with the time.

Something like that let the owner to decide and, maybe, the user push their use because it feels more secure, not directly the CA.

Will see how Azure FD will handle this. We opened more than expected tickets with support on certs not updating automatically...

This naively (or maliciously perhaps) maintains that the "purpose" of the certificate is to identify an entity. While identity and safeguarding against MITM is important, identity is not the primary purpose certificates serve in the real world. At least that is not how they are used or why they are purchased.

They are purchased to provide encryption. Nobody checks the details of a cert and even if they did they wouldn't know what to look for in a counterfeit anyway.

This is just another gatekeeping measure to make standing up, administering, and operating private infrastructure difficult. "Just use Google / AWS / Azure instead."

Browsers check the identity of the certificates every time. The host name is the identity.

There are lots of issues with trust and social and business identities in general, but for the purpose of encryption, the problem can be simplified to checking of the host name (it's effectively an out of band async check that the destination you're talking to is the same destination that independent checks saw, so you know your connection hasn't been intercepted).

You can't have effective TLS encryption without verifying some identity, because you're encrypting data with a key that you negotiate with the recipient on the other end of the connection. If someone inserts themselves into the connection during key exchange, they will get the decryption key (key exchange is cleverly done that a passive eavesdropper can't get the key, but it can't protect against an active eavesdropper — other than by verifying the active participant is "trusted" in a cryptographic sense, not in a social sense).

I think it's absolutely critical when I'm sending a password to a site that it's actually the site it claims to be. That's identity. It matters a lot.

Not to users. The user who types Wal-Mart into their address bar expects to communicate with Wal-Mart. They aren't going to check if the certificate matches. Only that the icon is green.

This is where the disconnect comes in. Me and you know that the green icon doesn't prove identity. It proves certificate validity. But that's not what this is "sold as" by the browser or the security community as a whole. I can buy the domain Wаl-Mart right now and put a certificate on it that says Wаl-Mаrt and create the conditions for that little green icon to appear. Notice that I used U+0430 instead of the letter "a" that you're used to.

And guess what... The identity would match and pass every single test you throw at it. I would get a little green icon in the browser and my certificate would be good. This attack fools even the brightest security professionals.

So you see, Identity isn't the value that people expect from a certificate. It's the encryption.

Users will allow a fake cert with a green checkmark all day. But a valid certificate with a yellow warning is going to make people stop and think.

> This naively (or maliciously perhaps) maintains that the "purpose" of the certificate is to identify an entity. [...] identity is not the primary purpose certificates serve in the real world.

Identity is the only purpose that certificates serve. SSL/TLS wouldn't have needed certificates at all if the goal was purely encryption: key exchange algorithms work just fine without either side needing keys (e.g. the key related to the certificate) ahead of time.

But encryption without authentication is a Very Bad Idea, so SSL was wisely implemented from the start to require authentication of the server, hence why it was designed around using X.509 certificates. The certificates are only there to provide server authentication.

>This naively (or maliciously perhaps) maintains that the "purpose" of the certificate is to identify an entity. While identity and safeguarding against MITM is important, identity is not the primary purpose certificates serve in the real world. At least that is not how they are used or why they are purchased.

"example.com" is an identity just like "Stripe, Inc"[1]. Just because it doesn't have a drivers license or article of incorporation, doesn't mean it's not an identity.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20171222000208/https://stripe.ia...

>This is just another gatekeeping measure to make standing up, administering, and operating private infrastructure difficult. "Just use Google / AWS / Azure instead."

Certbot is trivial to set up yourself, and deploying it in production isn't so hard that you need to be "Google / AWS / Azure" to do it. There's plenty of IaaS/PaaS services that have letsencrypt, that are orders of magnitude smaller than those hyperscalers.

Continually surprised by how emotional people get about cert lifetimes.

I get that there are some fringe cases where it’s not possible but for the rest - automate and forget.

If emotional reactions to a (likely intentional) annoyance factor surprises you, remember that people start wars for differing sets of beliefs!

But there's also security implications: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43708319

All I care about as a certbot user is what do I need to do.

Do I need to update certbot in all my servers? Or would they continue to work without the need to update?

The poor vendor folk needs to come more often on site to fix the cert issue.

Good.

If you can't make this happen, don't use WebPKI and use internal PKI.

Petition to Remove members voting rights from the CABForum who have a commercial interest: https://chng.it/WcR6t2WQd2

Has anyone managed to calculate the increase power usage across the entire internet this change will cause? Well, I suppose the environment can take one more for the team.

The single use of AI to generate that video of Trump licking Elon Musk's feet, used significantly more power than this change will cause to be used over the next decade.

It's great to be environmentally conscious, but if reducing carbon emissions is your goal, complaining about this is a lot like saying that people shouldn't run marathons, because physical activity causes humans to exhale more CO2.

> The single use of AI to generate that video of Trump licking Elon Musk's feet, used significantly more power than this change will cause to be used over the next decade.

We are effectively talking about the entire world wide web generating multiple highly secure cryptograph key pairs every 47 days. That is a lot of CPU cycles.

Also you not picking up on the Futurama quote is disappointing.

ah this is gonna piss off a few coworkers today but it's a good move either way.

semi-related question: where is the letsencrypt workalike for s/mime?

This sucks. I'm actually so sick of mandatory TLS. All we did was get Google Analytics and all the other spyware running “““securely””” while making it that much harder for any regular person to host anything online. This will push people even further into the arms of the walled gardens as they decide they don't want to deal with the churn and give up.

First.... 99% of people have zero interest in hosting things themselves anyways. Like on their own server themselves. Geocities era was possibly the first and last time that "having your own page" was cool, and that was basically killed by social media.

As for certs... maybe at the start it was hard, but it's really quite easy to host things online, with a valid certificate. There are many CDN services like Cloudflare which will handle it for you. There are also application proxies like Traefik and Caddy which will get certs for you.

Most people who want their own site today, will use Kinsta or SquareSpace or GitHub pages any one of thousands of page/site hosting services. All of whom have a system for certificates that is so easy to use, most people don't even realize it is happening.

lol at recommending Cloudflare and Microsoft (Github) in response to a comment decrying spyware

Every single thing you mentioned is plugged in to the tier-1 surveillance brokers. I am talking plain files on single server shoved in a closet, or cheap VPS. I don't often say this but I really don't think you “get” it.

Lol this is literally not true. I've set up self-hosted websites with no knowledge (just reading tutorials) and TLS is by far not the hardest step.

A brand-new setup is not relevant to what I'm talking about. Try ignoring your entire infrastructure for a few years and see if you still think that lol

I hate this, but I'm also glad it's happening, because it will speed up the demise of Web PKI.

CAs and web PKI are a bad joke. There's too many ways to compromise security, there's too many ways to break otherwise-valid web sites/apps/connections, there's too many organizations that can be tampered with, the whole process is too complex and bug-prone.

What Web PKI actually does, in a nutshell, is prove cryptographically that at some point in the past, there was somebody who had control of either A) an e-mail address or B) a DNS record or C) some IP space or D) some other thing, and they generated a certificate through any of these methods with one of hundreds of organizations. OR it proves that they stole the keys of such a person.

It doesn't prove that who you're communicating with right now is who they say they are. It only proves that it's someone who, at some point, got privileged access to something relating to a domain.

That's not what we actually want. What we actually want is to be assured this remote host we're talking to now is genuine, and to keep our communication secret and safe. There are other ways to do that, that aren't as convoluted and vulnerable as the above. We don't have to twist ourselves into all these knots.

I'm hopeful changes like these will result in a gradual catastrophy which will push industry to actually adopt simpler, saner, more secure solutions. I've proposed one years ago but nobody cares because I'm just some guy on the internet and not a company with a big name. Nothing will change until the people with all the money and power make it happen, and they don't give a shit.

It's hard to express how absolutely catastrophic this is for the Internet, and how incompetent a group of people have to be to vote 25/0 for increasing a problem that breaks the Internet for many organizations yearly by a factor of ten for zero appreciable security benefit.

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.

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.

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.

It's actually far worse for smaller sites and organizations than large ones. Entire pricey platforms exist around managing certificates and renewals, and large companies can afford those or develop their own automated solutions.

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.

Can you point to a specific security problem this change is actually solving? For example, can we attribute any major security compromises in the last 5 years to TLS certificate lifetime?

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.

> They didn't do this because they're incompetent but because they think it'll improve security.

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.

A large part of why it breaks things is because it only happens yearly. If you rotate certs on a regular pace, you actually get good at it and it stops breaking, ever. (basically everything I've set up with letsencrypt has needed zero maintenance, for example)

So at a 47 day cadence, it's true we'll have to regularly maintain it: We'll need to hire another staff member to constantly do nothing but. (Most of the software we use does not support automated rotation yet. I assume some will due to this change, but certainly not 100%.)

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.

You can disagree with all of this, but calling for everyone involved to be fired is just ridiculous and mean-spirited.

Is it? This is the crux of the problem with a lot of institutions. There's little to no professional accountability for bad moves anymore. It used to be that doing a good job and taking pride in one's work was all you needed to do to keep your job.

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.

Eff this shit. I'm getting out of sysadmin.

Oh no, Bunch of stupid bureacrats came up with another dumb idea. What a surprise!

Are the 47 days to please the current US Administration?

Based on the linked-to page, no:

    47 days might seem like an arbitrary number, but it’s a simple cascade:

    * 200 days = 6 maximal month (184 days) + 1/2 30-day month (15 days) + 1 day wiggle room
    * 100 days = 3 maximal month (92 days) + ~1/4 30-day month (7 days) + 1 day wiggle room
    * 47 days = 1 maximal month (31 days) + 1/2 30-day month (15 days) + 1 day wiggle room

I'm on the SSL/TLS team @ Cloudflare. We have great managed certificate products that folks should consider using as certificate validity periods continue to shorten.

Simply having a domain managed by Cloudflare makes it magically https; yes, the traffic between the origin server and Cloudflare isn't encrypted, so it's not completely "secure", but for most uses it's good enough. It's also zero-maintenance and free.

Keep up the good work! ;-)

SSL added and removed here ;-)

yeah I'm convinced this is the real reason for these changes...

perverse incentives indeed.

Is this a joke (as in, that you don't actually work there) to make CF look bad for posting product advertisements in comment threads, or is this legit?

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