Six day and IP address certificate options in 2025
165 comments
·January 16, 2025rickette
ryandrake
To someone like me with hobby-level serving needs, the 90 day certificate life is pretty inconvenient, despite having automation set up. I run a tiny VPS that hosts basic household stuff like e-mail and a few tiny web sites for people, and letsencrypt/certbot automation around certificate renewal is the only thing that I seem to need to regularly babysit and log in to manually run/fix. Everything else just hums along, but I know it's been 90 days because I suddenly can't connect to my E-mail or one of the web virtual hosts went down again. And sure enough, I just need to run certbot renew manually or restart lighttpd or whatever.
outworlder
> To someone like me with hobby-level serving needs, the 90 day certificate life is pretty inconvenient
I's only inconvenient because it isn't properly automated. That's by design.
When this can be a acme.sh script cronjob, there isn't much of an excuse. Even my Raspberry Pi dedicated to my 3D printer is happily renewing certificates.
At least with this thing breaking every 90 days you have it fresh on your mind. One year away you may not even remember what you have to do.
Needless to say, you have a bug to fix.
theoreticalmal
What does your 3D printer Pi serve such that it needs a cert? Do you have ports 80 and 443 open and forwarded to it?
jeroenhd
Let's Encrypt doesn't work great when the Let's Encrypt client software has a bug or is misconfigured (one of those is true for your situation).
I think keeping the validity long just removes incentives for people to bother fixing their setups. We've seen the shift from "Craig needs to spend a few days on certificate renewal every year" to full automation in most environments when the 90 day validity period was introduced, and shortening it to a week will only help further automation.
You'll always have the option to skip the hassle (for a small fee, unless a Let's Encrypt competitor joins the market), but I feel the benefits outweigh the downsides.
I personally would've preferred something like DANE working, but because the best we've got is DNSSEC and most of the internet doesn't even bother implementing that, I doubt we'll ever see that replace the current CA system.
raxxor
I cannot say that this works as flawless as some would advertise, with just as script running every 90 days. Some services do not load certificates while running and must be restarted. That alone can be a hassle.
Some software now uses short lived certificates and even with decent configurations, there is an elevated level of problems specifically because of certificates. Especially in networks that use a lot of segmentation with very restricted network traffic.
I think a short lifetime can be a security benefit, but it should not become a dogma. It should be employed where it really makes sense but as a general rule inconvenient describes it quite well.
arielcostas
There are other "open" CAs that can be used for free. For example, Google Public CA, Buypass and ZeroSSL, which all support the ACME protocol though you need an account there to get EAB credentials, that then are configured in Certbot or whatever you use.
hulitu
> I think keeping the validity long just removes incentives for people to bother fixing their setups.
The best certificates should expire after 20ms. /s
MaKey
> [...] despite having automation set up.
Clearly it's not working correctly, so a longer certificate lifetime wouldn't address the root cause - you would just have to fix your setup less often.
tasuki
> To someone like me with hobby-level serving needs, the 90 day certificate life is pretty inconvenient, despite having automation set up.
I also have hobby-level serving needs. I've been using LetsEncrypt since whenever it was they started. I have two top level domains and a whole lot of subdomains.
I've never had to babysit certificate renewal, nor had to log in manually to fix anything. Not once. How comes?
5d41402abc4b
If your server is not accessible from the internet you need to use DNS based authentication for which you need to have a DNS API key lying around on your server which is a significant risk.
ryandrake
Weird. It's always been flaky for me, so I thought it was just the usual run-of-the-mill crappy software and that everyone just deals with it. I can't imagine what the bug might be in a 6 line shell script that just runs certbot and then restarts a bunch of services.
eikenberry
I also use Certbot (v2.1.0) for my small VPS/hobby setup (www + email) and I haven't had to mess with it since I set it up in 2021. Just adding another data point so you know it doesn't have to be painful. I'll be happy to help, just drop me a line.
xorcist
I don't know what your issues are, but perhaps the know-it-all people who comments on this with a variation of "you're doing it wrong" or a problem of "not enough automation" could cool down a bit and realize the web PKI is hacks build from hacks and there are many reasons why the public ACME system may not be entirely robust for every application.
On the top of my head, that could be because one or more domains are not accessible from the public Internet (which could be for a variety of reasons), a subset of the subject domains having expired for legitimate reasons but you might not know which in advance (certificates being what they are some application rely on them having alternative names), intermittently flaky routing (which might not be a problem for the application), and a number of other reasons. That's without including potentially hostile actors. Then there are plenty of offline uses for certificates!
That said, Let's Encrypt has really been a revolution and made life better for many people. But it's not perfect and the PKI system itself has many warts. It's absolutely a system that may need a non negligible amount of babysitting when you venture outside the absolute mainstream.
tptacek
If you're using LetsEncrypt without automation you're doing it wrong, and the reason that the WebPKI is so hacky is that it was insulated from basic computer science for 2 decades and run by enterprise software companies.
You have to automate certificates. You can't do these by hand anymore. Certificate lifetimes are going to get inexorably shorter.
throw0101a
> To someone like me with hobby-level serving needs, the 90 day certificate life is pretty inconvenient, despite having automation set up.
I've been running an LE client (official one, dehydrated, others) on various system for ~8 years, and the one time I had an issue with renewing was when (AIUI) the LE folks changed CDNs and so their responses were (slightly) different and dehydrated needed to be tweaked:
* https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/jws-has-no-anti-replay-n...
* https://github.com/dehydrated-io/dehydrated/commit/e4e712c03...
Other than that, never had an issue.
supriyo-biswas
You could also terminate TLS or implement HTTPS with Caddy, which will auto-renew your certs for you.
KronisLV
Curiously, even Apache2 has functionality in the form of mod_md: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_md.html
Not as advanced as in Caddy (which will be a more pleasant option to use in many cases), but it's curious to see them adding something like that! Makes me wonder whether we'll also get some Nginx functionality like that out of the box sometime so certbot won't have to always be installed alongside it for sites that need to use ACME.
duskwuff
When Let's Encrypt got started in 2014, CAs could issue certificates valid for up to five years - and many did. The CA/Browser Forum has slowly been ratcheting that down.
tialaramex
That (five year certs) was technically true, but the CA/B BRs already told you that was going away in 2015 when Let's Encrypt was started. I don't know how many were still actually selling such a product by the point Let's Encrypt is on the scene.
I think the drop-dead date for this product was like April 2015 or so. The ideal customer for a product like this (lazy and also incompetent but with plenty of money) is also likely to leave it too late. I won't guarantee we'd have caught that, but unlike forbidden steps taken to avert a bigger mess of ones own making (as happened for SHA-1 deprecation, some notable financial outfits secured certs which should not have existed, to cover for the fact they hadn't properly managed their own technical risks) this seems like a product category thing, nobody was openly selling certs that would just break in Chrome, that's a bad product.
[Why would such certificates break in Chrome? Google hate these long lived certs so Chrome treats certificates which have validity exceeding what the BRs authorise as immediately invalid, if you want to moan to Google about why your prohibited certs don't work you're basically admitting you violated your agreement with them so it's like showing up to claim your stolen rucksack full of cocaine from the cops...]
KronisLV
> Let's Encrypt was (one of) the first to use drastically shorter life spans, hence all the ACME automation effort.
Surely there are tradeoffs in having to rotate the certs that often, right? Notably, considerable load on their infrastructure. I get that urging people to automate their renewals makes sense (though I've also heard people unironically saying: "I want it to be a manual process, so I know how it works instead of relying on some black box"), but it seems that shorter and shorter cert lifetimes might put more strain on a service that nigh everyone seems to just be using for free.
Edit: at least there are a lot of prominent companies here https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/
raihansaputra
I just looked into OCSP and their planned sunsetting of their OCSP server, and it seems like they'd much rather scale this as their core activity than provide/maintain/scale other stuff like the OCSP service.
apitman
IP certs improve a niche but interesting use case for me. I run a domain registrar that implements a simple OAuth2 protocol[0] for delegating domains/subdomains. I also have an open source tunneling tool called boringproxy that implements the client side of this protocol[1].
boringproxy needs to provide a callback redirect_uri to the oauth server in order to retrieve it's token, which it can then use for setting DNS records. However, it can't provide an HTTPS endpoint until it can set up those DNS records and get a cert. Chicken/egg. Currently the spec requires the server to implement a `GET /temp-domain` endpoint which creates a DNS record like 157-245-231-242.example.com which points at the client's IP. This lets boringproxy bootstrap a secure OAuth2 callback endpoint.
IP certs would remove an entire step from this process.
[0]: https://github.com/takingnames/namedrop-protocol-spec
[1]: This is actually broken in boringproxy at the moment, but there's a demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hf72-fYTts
ray_v
This feels like a disaster waiting to happen -- like what happens if (when?) Let's Encrypt suffers a significant outage and sites can't refresh certificates? Do we just tolerate a significant portion of the Internet being down or broken due to expired certificates? And for what tradeoff? A very small amount of extra security? Is this because certificate revocation is a harder problem to solve / implement at Internet scale?
Arnavion
I agree. Anecdotally, the last time LE had an outage that prevented my cert from renewing, it took about ~4.5 days from when I reported the issue to them to when they started looking and provided a workaround. Since this was a 90-day cert it still had 30 days left on it, so I wasn't worried. If it had been a 6-day cert and only had 2 days left on it, I would've had to go to red alert and switch to another CA ASAP.
https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/post-to-new-order-url-fa...
If they do start providing 6-day certs I hope their turnaround on issue reports is faster than that (and ideally have something better for reporting issues than a community forum where you have to suffer clueless morons spamming your thread).
mholt
Fortunately, most ACME clients, including my own, support other CAs as fallbacks. (Caddy's ACME stack falls back to ZeroSSL by default, automatically.)
That, and extended week-long outages are extremely unlikely.
deathanatos
> That, and extended week-long outages are extremely unlikely.
You only need the outage to last for the window of [begin renewal attempts, expiration], not the entire 6d lifetime.
For example, with the 90d certs, I think cert-manager defaults to renewal at 30d out. Let's assume the same grace, of ~33% of the total life, for the 6d certs: that means renew at 2d out. So if an outage persisted for 2d, those certs would be at risk of expiring.
mholt
True, but it doesn't matter since competent clients should be falling back to other CAs anyway.
mkj
I suspect ZeroSSL might have capacity problems if the entire userbase of letencrypt moved to them in a few days. Letsencrypt are talking about 100 million certs/day in future?
cyberax
Plenty of clients don't have that option. E.g.: Synology NAS, Mikrotik routers.
arianvanp
A 7 day outage seems rather unlikely no?
pilif
In average half of the certs would expire in half of the time. A 3.5 days sustained DDoS attack would cause half of the sites using a 6 day certificate to be offline.
zzyzxd
I am not saying 6 days is long enough, but if your automation always wait until the last minute to renew certs, you may have more issues to worry about than the CA's availability. If I am going to use a cert with 6 days lifetime I will be renewing it at least once a day.
captn3m0
I remember being surprised when Cloudflare launched https://1.1.1.1 with a valid cert and I immediately wanted one, but couldn’t find an easy way to get one.
I am gonna try to run a DoH resolver on this and see how it goes.
prdonahue
This was a fun conversation.
I remember calling Clint and Jeremy at DigiCert and asking: "hey we have this cool IP address—what are the odds you guys can issue a certificate for it?"
I'm not sure if they had to dust off some code or process to do it, but they got it done really quickly once the demonstration of control was handled.
DonHopkins
The coolest easiest to remember ip address I ever used was mimsy.cs.umd.edu: 128.8.128.8
yegle
For others who don't know how certificate for IP addresses relates to a DNS-over-HTTPS server: https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-ddr-support/
snailmailman
I’m really glad they have a page on that IP. I use it decently often for “is the problem DNS?” troubleshooting.
Because if zero pages load, but that one does, the issue is DNS.
Ping is easy too of course, but I can ask people to type four ones with periods between into their search bar over the phone. No command line required.
crtasm
>We expect to issue the first valid short-lived certificates to ourselves in February of this year. Around April we will enable short-lived certificates for a small set of early adopting subscribers. We hope to make short-lived certificates generally available by the end of 2025.
zie
Meanwhile Qualsys has a “vulnerability scanner” that says a certificate that expires in under a month is a level 1 vulnerability(ID #38174): https://docs.qualys.com/en/certview/latest/get_started/certv...
throw0101c
Note that ACME profiles are new, to the extent that the draft spec is (a) personal (and not prefixed with draft-ietf…), and (b) currently versioned -00:
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-aaron-acme-profiles/
The ACME spec is:
mholt
Yeah... thankfully, it's "pretty simple" for clients to implement. Just add a JSON field to your payload and that's it. (There's a little bit of error checking logic and input validation, like making sure the value is valid, but overall it's not too complex, unlike ARI, which is much more work.)
blakesterz
I don't disagree with anything they say here:
https://letsencrypt.org/2025/01/16/6-day-and-ip-certs/#short...
But... How often do these types of compromises happen? I can't say I've ever seen or heard of it happening.
mholt
That's the thing. We don't always know. Hence the need to reduce the attack lifetime.
H8crilA
Impossible to say, as most people probably don't even know that their private key is stolen. I've personally seen it only once on a real certificate revocation. Yet another reason to have shorter lifespan.
yjftsjthsd-h
If they don't know they were breached, don't the odds favor the replaced key likewise getting re-stolen immediately?
H8crilA
Yes, but the odds are less than infinite, i.e. the probability is less than 1.0. At least some of such attacks take effort.
Spivak
It's a pretty narrow threat model for Alice to get her cert stolen by Bob, be completely unaware that this has happened, and the means Bob used only works once.
ikiris
Often enough a protocol was made to deal with it. The compromises have mostly been kept quiet though or at least didn’t get much news traction.
Azerty9999
Hmmm. This solution still leaves quite a few days a compromised certificate can be used(!).. that's significant.. but I guess it's better than nothing?
LinuxBender
An example I experienced was an employee accidentally shipping keys/certs to a vendor in a support dump of a network device.
I had to revoke the certs and in anticipation I pulled together customer support, engineering, legal, various security orgs in the event that revocation would cause outages from cached certs from middle boxes of which there were plenty or other weird b2b setups.
It turned out to be a nothing-burger. None of the browsers or MitM proxies actually did anything with revocation and happily used the revoked certs without even a single warning from tens of millions of end users and system. This was around 2014. Curious if that has changed and if anyone here has tested revocation in a staging environment that has devices that cache certs.
toast0
I had to get certificates revoked for HeartBleed. :P
Eikon
This will get interesting for many CT transparency monitors which for many are already seeing scalability issues.
I am operating https://www.merklemap.com/ and the current scale is already impressive.
mholt
I don't know much about CT requirements, but can't they prune data out of their logs after some time? Since the certs only last 6 days, the growth of the logs can be capped at some point right? If not now, provisions for such operations could surely be implemented, I imagine.
PS. Neat site!
Eikon
> I don't know much about CT requirements, but can't they prune data out of their logs after some time? Since the certs only last 6 days, the growth of the logs can be capped at some point right?
That's what happens - logs are "expired" after a few years. But if you want to have an exhaustive monitor, you probably don't want to discard the records of expired certificates.
> PS. Neat site!
Thank you!
o11c
Hmm, I wonder if it's possible to do dedicated intermediate certificates that promise to only sign short-lived certificates for a single site? That way the CT-log could be taught to only keep the intermediate?
null
chrismorgan
> The dns-01 challenge type will not be available because the DNS is not involved in validating IP addresses. Additionally, there is no mechanism to check CAA records for IP addresses.
Is in-addr.arpa. not usable for these purposes? Given how you can do PTR records to map IP address to domain name, I had just assumed it would be at least theoretically usable for more, even if few or no hosts exposed it so at present.
baby_souffle
That just proves you have a way to manipulate DNS.
Doesn’t prove you own the thing the IP routes to.
mixdup
I mean that applies to DNS authentication for non-IP certificates, too
baby_souffle
> I mean that applies to DNS authentication for non-IP certificates, too
Right, but "show me you own foo.com" is a pretty reasonable bar to clear for issuing a certificate with a CN of "foo.com".
Show me you own `1.1.1.1` by manipulating the DNS for "foo.com" is ... not quite the same.
ranger207
What's the end goal here? A new cert per connection? I think if, hypothetically, that were the case, where Let's Encrypt validates the domain owner on every connection, then that'd move the attack surface from trying to get private cert keys to... other attacks, in general. Is there reason to believe that "other attacks" are less likely? Have there been many cases of should-have-been-revoked certs being used improperly?
mholt
"Other attacks" are much more expensive and for much less gain.
remram
What are reasons to use a certificate for an IP? Why wouldn't you use a name?
Someone already mentioned that it's needed for Discovery of Designated Resolvers (DDR) for DNS-over-HTTPS. Anything else?
abrookewood
Names cost cash; maybe you don't need/want one.
extraduder_ire
xip and https://nip.io are common workarounds for this.
I can't remember if one or both are in the mozilla list of public domain prefixes though.
extraduder_ire
If you need https, but whatever device you want to serve to doesn't let you use hostnames.
remram
Like what?
Kinda funny to call the current 90 day certs "long lived". When Let's Encrypted started out more than 10 years ago most certs from major vendors had a 1 year life span. Let's Encrypt was (one of) the first to use drastically shorter life spans, hence all the ACME automation effort.