Let's Encrypt Announces New-Certificate-Every-6-Days Offering
Let's Encrypt Announces New-Certificate-Every-6-Days Offering
This letter was originally published in our 2024 Annual Report. The past year at ISRG has been a great one and I couldn’t be more proud of our staff, community, funders, and other partners that made it happen. Let’s Encrypt continues to thrive, serving more websites around the world than ever before...
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I understand their reasoning behind this, but I am not sure, this is such a good idea. Imagine Letsencrypt having technical issues or getting DDoS'd. If the certificates are valid for 90 days and are typically renewed well in advance, no real problem arises, but with only 6 days in total, you really can't renew them all that much in advance, so this risk of lots of sites having expired certificates in such a situation appears quite large to me.
That's true, but it would also have to be a serious attack for LE to be down for 3 entire days. There are multiple providers for automated certs, so you could potentially just switch if needed.
Most companies are not really suited for instant switching to a different cert service.
Most companies weren't suited for automatic certs either, but now they are
The attack would only need to last for a day or two, and then everyone requesting updated certs when it stops could push enough people outside the 6-day window to cause problems. 6 days is probably long enough to not be a huge issue, but it's getting close to problematic. Maybe change to 15 days, which should avoid the whole issue (people could update once/week and still have a spare week and a day to catch issues).
I volunteer to help with IT at a makerspace, and I hesitate to go for 6 day expiration times. As volunteers, we can't always fix problems in a timely way like paid IT staff could. We try to automate the hell out of everything, but certs have gone a day or two without getting updated before.
No one forces you to use let's encrypt certificates. Can just quickly switch to another one temporarily.
Yeah, if you notice within that 6-day window before it expires. If you don't catch it, your service could be down while you fix it, and that's bad.
Yeah you might be on vacation when it happens
Yeah you might be on vacation when it happens
What the fuck is a vacation?
It's a recent European invention, where you travel to other countries without your army.
But what if my army gets sad without me? What if I bring just some army? Ya know, in a travel carrier.
And then you forget about CAA records and wonder why it's not working