Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Monday February 24 2020, @07:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the honestly,-it's-for-your-own-good... dept.

Apple drops a bomb on long-life HTTPS certificates: Safari to snub new security certs valid for more than 13 months:

Safari will, later this year, no longer accept new HTTPS certificates that expire more than 13 months from their creation date. That means websites using long-life SSL/TLS certs issued after the cut-off point will throw up privacy errors in Apple's browser.

The policy was unveiled by the iGiant at a Certification Authority Browser Forum (CA/Browser) meeting on Wednesday. Specifically, according to those present at the confab, from September 1, any new website cert valid for more than 398 days will not be trusted by the Safari browser and instead rejected. Older certs, issued prior to the deadline, are unaffected by this rule.

By implementing the policy in Safari, Apple will, by extension, enforce it on all iOS and macOS devices. This will put pressure on website admins and developers to make sure their certs meet Apple's requirements – or risk breaking pages on a billion-plus devices and computers.

[...] Shortening the lifespan of certificates does come with some drawbacks. It has been noted that by increasing the frequency of certificate replacements, Apple and others are also making life a little more complicated for site owners and businesses that have to manage the certificates and compliance.

"Companies need to look to automation to assist with certificate deployment, renewal, and lifecycle management to reduce human overhead and the risk of error as the frequency of certificate replacement increase," Callan told us.

We note Let's Encrypt issues free HTTPS certificates that expire after 90 days, and provides tools to automate renewals, so those will be just fine – and they are used all over the web now. El Reg's cert is a year-long affair so we'll be OK.

GitHub.com uses a two-year certificate, which would fall foul of Apple's rules though it was issued before the cut-off deadline. However, it is due to be renewed by June, so there's plenty of opportunity to sort that out. Apple's website has a year-long HTTPS cert that needs renewing in October.

Microsoft is an interesting one: its dot-com's cert is a two-year affair, which expires in October. If Redmond renews it for another two years, it'll trip up over Safari's policy.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday February 25 2020, @01:07AM (1 child)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Tuesday February 25 2020, @01:07AM (#962136) Journal

    All 3 Safari users will be highly inconvenienced.

    What do you mean, "will be"? Broken CSS rendering is an ongoing problem in Safari on IOS. Try making a post here using Safari on IOS. Scrolling sideways is totally broken, so you don't see the left and right sides of your posts - and it's worse in landscape view. And auto-correct keeps trying to render "fuck" as "duck".

    --
    SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @01:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @01:21PM (#962338)

    buck, duck, fuck, Huck, luck, muck, puck, suck, tuck. apparently the English language really likes this syllable.