3mo ago

TLS Certificate Lifetimes Will Officially Reduce to 47 Days (in 2029)

www.digicert.com TLS Certificate Lifetimes Will Officially Reduce to 47 Days

The CA/Browser Forum has officially voted to amend the TLS Baseline Requirements to set a schedule for shortening both the lifetime of TLS certificates.

From today until March 15, 2026, the maximum lifetime for a TLS certificate is 398 days.

As of March 15, 2026, the maximum lifetime for a TLS certificate will be 200 days.

As of March 15, 2027, the maximum lifetime for a TLS certificate will be 100 days.

As of March 15, 2029, the maximum lifetime for a TLS certificate will be 47 days.

What's everyone's opinion on this? I think from a security standpoint their reasoning is valid and in many cases it's very easy to automate the renewal with ACME or something else. But there's likely gonna be legacy stuff still around in 2029 that won't be easy to automate.

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34 comments

This will be so much fun for people with legacy systems
- Self signed certs about to get even more popular.
  
  Tony Stark was able to build his CA in a cave! With a bunch of dice!
  
  Self signed certs still have to abide. It’s the browser that checks it not the issuer. Now granted in most cases you already get a non trusted warning that most sysadmins skip…
  
  The cert is what tells the browser how long it lasts, so I'm not sure how the browser can stop you from using a 10 year self signed cert or one from your own CA
  
  If the browser sees it expires too far in the future, it could throw a warning or error.
  I doubt any of them will actually do it, but it's possible.
  
  Most browsers do this for certs with a lifetime longer than 398 days issued after 2020, which is one aspect of why so many websites use a 1 year validity period for their certs.
  
  Or just spin up a new one all the time?
- This way it will gradually ramp up the pain tho. If they went straight to 47 days, basically the entire internet would be gone for a few days.
- Self signed certs still support longer time frames
  If you need to expose a legacy system to the internet we have bigger issues

34 comments