alt Hacker NewsI have now implemented a 2 week renewal interval to test the change to the 45 days, and now they come with a 6-day certificate?
This is no criticism, I like what they do, but how am I supposed to do renewals? If something goes wrong, like the pipeline triggering certbot goes wrong, I won't have time to fix this. So I'd be at a two day renewal with a 4 day "debugging" window.
I'm certain there are some who need this, but it's not me. Also the rationale is a bit odd:
> IP address certificates must be short-lived certificates, a decision we made because IP addresses are more transient than domain names, so validating more frequently is important.
Are IP addresses more transient than a domain within a 45 day window? The static IPs you get when you rent a vps, they're not transient.
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The short-lived requirement seems pretty reasonable for IP certs as IP addresses are often rented and may bounce between users quickly. For example if you buy a VM on a cloud provider, as soon as you release that VM or IP it may be given to another customer. Now you have a valid certificate for that IP.
6 days actually seems like a long time for this situation!
It's less about IP address transience, and more about IP address control. Rarely does the operator of a website or service control the IP address. It's to limit the CA's risk.
> Are IP addresses more transient than a domain within a 45 day window?
If I don't assign an EIP to my EC2 instance and shut it down, I'm nearly guaranteed to get a different IP when I start it again, even if I start it within seconds of shutdown completing.
It'd be quite a challenge to use this behavior maliciously, though. You'd have to get assigned an IP that someone else was using recently, and the person using that IP would need to have also been using TLS with either an IP address certificate or with certificate verification disabled.
If you are doing this in a commercial context and the 4 day debugging window, or any downtime, would cause you more costs than say, buying a 1 year certificate from a commercial supplier, then that might be your answer there...
>I won't have time to fix this
Which should push you to automate the process.
The push for shorter and shorter cert lifetimes is a really poor idea, and indicates that the people working on these initiatives have no idea how things are done in the wider world.