Since the beginning of this year, Let’s Encrypt rolled out a new shortlived profile for certificates that make them valid for only 160 hours. The intention, as they say, is to encourage automation and reduce the window of certificate compromise (because revocation is somewhat a flakey thing).

Yet, I haven’t seen a lot of news about it since then. Hence the question: is this shorter cert thingy something you considered and deployed for your homelab?

As for me I’ve set up lego-acme with profile: "shortlived" on my rig. Lego runs on a bihourly cronjob, but only renews when a cert has >=3 days to expiry. It’s been pretty much a set-and-forget experience, although some more monitoring would be nice.

  • BorgDrone@feddit.nlEnglish
    271·
    20 hours ago

    Several reasons

    • If a private key leaks, a shorter certificate lifespan limits the fallout
    • Faster upgrades to new cryptographic standards. If some of the crypto methods used get broken, short lived certificates means they get replaced with newer methods faster
    • Short lived certificates force sysadmins to automate the renewal process. This prevents expired certificates due to forgetting the manual renewal.
    • Certificate lifetime and domain ownership mismatch. You could buy a 2 year certificate for somedomain.com and then sell the domain or just let it expire and have it picked up by someone else. You then have a valid certificate for a domain you no longer ow and you could MitM traffic for the new owner’s website.
    • billwashere@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      15 hours ago

      You make some good arguments so I’m not attacking you at all, just my thoughts on your points. These short renewal times are getting to the point of ridiculousness and creating another point of failure with little time to do anything about it. I find these super short certs less than useful, create many more possible problems, and not really necessary except for a small set of circumstances. And I have been in IT as a web dev/sys admin/systems architect for over 30 years now.

      • If a private key leaks you’ve likely done something wrong. Practice better key management and don’t be stupid
      • Updating certs to keep up with new crypto standards is useless. For one they don’t change that often and if there is a pressing reason you can’t update earlier.
      • Yes the processes have to be automated which is not a bad idea at all. But you are completely relying on the service to not be down and that something on your end hasn’t also broken. Anybody that hasn’t ever been a sys admin has had several automated process die for no apparent reason.
      • This could actually be an issue but totally out of your control. This is only relevant if you domain hop frequently and if your that worried about security, you aren’t doing that.
      • Auli@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        10 hours ago

        It is all automated so who cares. And if it is down for 3 days there is something wrong.

        • GameGod@lemmy.caEnglish
          2·
          3 hours ago

          If your automation breaks on day 1 of your vacation, you’re now forced to spend some of your vacation fixing it. Hope you were checking email.

    • ÚwÙ-Passwort@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      20 hours ago

      My last job had an Onlineshop, 4years in a row the colleague dealing with ssl wad on vacation when the cert ran out.

      • Auli@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        10 hours ago

        ACME is automated. Since it is all automated they are shorting the life. If your not automated have fun or purchase a longer one.

      • chronicledmonocle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        19 hours ago

        Your colleague sucked at automation. Normally, I’d say no one should be bothered on vacation, but in this case you should have called him on his vacation, since he didn’t value anyone else’s time either.

        • roofuskit@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7·
          18 hours ago

          The manager sucked. There’s a lot of solutions to this issue but cross training and proper backup preparation are the most ideal ones.

    • undefinedTruth@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      18 hours ago

      Short lived certificates force sysadmins to automate the renewal process. This prevents expired certificates due to forgetting the manual renewal.

      That was already the case with the 90 day ones. No sane person is going to be manually renewing certificates every 3 months.