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from the honestly,-it's-for-your-own-good... dept.
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.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday February 25 2020, @02:49PM (1 child)
Source please. The article I linked above ("High-reliability OCSP stapling and why it matters" by Nick Sullivan [cloudflare.com]) states that sites that use Cloudflare have been stapling since 2016 when Cloudflare introduced proactive fetching of OCSP responses as they near the typical 7-day expiration window.
What incidents have been reported of unexpired OCSP responses being used to forge connections on a recently revoked certificate?
Unless the VPS provider is having an outage. For example, an SSD outage on Google Compute Engine in December 2019 [google.com] brought down the Discord chat service [discordapp.com] among other sites.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @10:58PM
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssl-pulse/ [ssllabs.com] shows that around 32.6% currently staple at all. According to censys, 190,921 certificates must-staple [censys.io] and 446,079,247 certificates don't [censys.io]. Even if the number were tilted so that the must-staple ones had 999 SANs and the "non-must-staple" had zero, then at best less than 30% of the domain names would be must-staple. A more reasonable number on either end of that for SANs just makes the percentage of must-staple sites worse.
It is a theoretical vulnerability, you asked how it was possible which two people explained. Even if there was an incident where it occurred, it may not be reported or widely publicized. But that doesn't change the fact that such a theoretical vulnerability exists, especially against those MITMed by someone or other situations.
And yes, lots of things can have outages, but an OCSP failure is not one of those you can plan for, work around, or have redundancy over (unlike your VPS example) without having multiple certificates from different providers spread around your infrastructure in advance or ready to go. And again, that is if you even notice the problem in the first place.