logoalt Hacker News

j1elotoday at 7:33 AM2 repliesview on HN

Cert lifetimes are such a burden. I wanted to provide pre-configured server examples of my WebRTC project, something that was download-and-run without any more prior knowledge (an important point), which users could access from their LAN e.g. to test the examples from their phones (not from the useless localhost exemption that exists for secure contexts), for which a self-signed cert embedded in the examples was fine. New users could run them, new concepts (such as security and certificate management in production apps) could be learned at an apropriate time.

Until web browsers started to believe that no, that was too much of a convenience, so now long expiration certs became rejected. What's the proposed solution from the "industry"? to run a whole automation pipeline just to update a file in each example folder every few months? bonkers. These should be static examples, no reason to having to update those any earlier than every few years, at most.


Replies

nickftoday at 6:30 PM

A certificate is a binding of a cryptographic key, along with an attestation of control of a DNS record(s) at a point in time. DNS changes frequently. The attestation needs to be refreshed much more frequently to ensure accuracy.

noman-landtoday at 7:37 AM

Wouldn't it be better to bundle a script that generates a cert instead of the cert itself?