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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 vux984 on Thursday February 27 2020, @05:52PM (1 child)
What are people supposed to do that don't have you around to manage their network for them? Meanwhile the printer's chat support will simply tell her to turn off child-safe mode, same as they currently instruct you to 'continue anyway' past the bad cert.
Agreed. But "blame the user" isn't a solution. And it's a bad software design pattern to ask end-users questions they aren't likely to know the answer to; especially security related questions, or to ask them "are they sure?" all day.
I'm aware, and im not sure how that changes anything. I even alluded to it as a potential solution for the ipv6 private routed intranet question.
The point remains, there is almost never a good reason for an *end user* to bypass an expired cert to reach an internet FQDN. There are LOTS of good reasons for end users to bypass expired certs on the LAN. So its an improvement over the status quo. **Even** if its not perfect, it reduces the attack surface, and reduces the number of useless warnings users get.
Sure if a malicious actor has control of your LAN router, and of your localhost lan ip configuration so that it can trick your host into thinking address X is on the LAN, and then they get you to enter that host's IP address directly into the address bar of your browser, so it can arp proxy the packets to an internet host ... then you are so totally pwned anyway that nothing was going to save you.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday February 27 2020, @11:07PM
It's better than Nerfing the world. Better yet, educate the user (No means No) then hope for the best.