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.
Are compromised private keys that much of a problem in the real world to merit such a pain in the ass, heavy handed “solution”? On paper, sure, it makes sense. In practice, you’re forcing people to complicate the process by introducing, until now, unnecessary automation and introducing the possibility of brand new points of vulnerability.
I say this as someone who does maintain legacy systems (i.e. systems), so take it with a very angry, frazzled grain of salt. But I’ve done this for
yearsdecades and many, many systems and to my knowledge, I’ve never had a compromised private key.This just seems like people who constantly lose their house keys mandating that everyone else change their locks as often as they do.
are you sure this mandates always using a new private key? I think I have read that they don’t. how would you verify that anyway?