Hacker News Reader

Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

It will make ACME the only viable option. I believe there is a second free ACME CA and other CAs will likely adopt ACME if they want to stay relevant.

Ideally, this will take less ongoing labor than annual manual rotations, and I'd argue sites that can't handle this would have been likely to break at the next annual rotation anyways.

If they have certificates managed by hosters, the hosters will deal with it. If they don't, then someone was already paying for the renewal and handling the replacement on the server side, making it much more likely that it will be fixed.

View on HN

I'm quite surprised the CA/Browser Forum went for this.

Nobody's paying for EV certificates now browsers don't display the EV details. The only reason to pay for a certificate is if you're rotating certificates manually, and the 90 day expiry of Lets Encrypt certificates is a hassle.

If the CA/Browser Forum is forcing everyone to run ACME clients (or outsource to a managed provider like AWS or Cloudflare) doesn't that eliminate the last substantial reason to give money to a CA?

My case, I have to manage a portal for old tvs and those don’t accept the LE root certificate since they changed a couple of years ago. Unfortunately the vendor is unable to update the firmware with new certificates and we are sold

Yeah that LE root certificate change broke our PROD for about 25% of traffic when it happened. Everyone acts like we control our client's cert chains. Clients don't look at the failure and think "our system is broken - we should upgrade". They look at the connection failure and think "this vendor is busted - might as well switch to someone who works". I switched away from LE to the other free ACME provider for our public-facing certs after that.

Roots for all CAs are going to be rotating much more frequently now. Looking to be every 5 years.

I'd be interested in hearing more - do you have a source for this?

Seems to me CAs have intermediate certificates and can rotate those, not much upside to rotating the root certificates, and lots of downsides.

Chrome root policy, and likely other root policies are moving toward 5-years rotation of the roots, and annual rotation of issuing CAs. Cross-signing works fine for root rotation in most cases, unless you use IIS, then it becomes a fun problem.

What an absolute pain in the ass for a mediocre increase in security.

The upside to rotating roots is:

1. These might need to happen as emergencies if something bad happens

2. If roots rotate often then we build the muscle of making sure trust bundles can be updated

I think the weird amount they are being rotated today is the real root cause if broken devices and we need to stop the bleed at some point.

> If roots rotate often then we build the muscle of making sure trust bundles can be updated

Five years is not enough incentive to push this change. A TV manufacturer can simply shrug and claim that the device is not under warranty anymore. We'll only end up with more bricked devices.

5 years also is a step not a destination

Sounds more like a detour across hot coals that doesn't get us anywhere closer to the destination.

> 1. These might need to happen as emergencies if something bad happens

Isn't this the whole point of intermediate certificates, though?

You know, all the CA's online systems only having an intermediate certificate (and even then, keeping it in a HSM) and the CA's root only being used for 20 seconds or so every year to update the intermediate certificates? And the rest of the time being locked up safer than Fort Knox?

The thing is even the most secure facilities need ingress and egress points.

Those are weaknesses. It’s also that a root rotation might be needed for completely stupid vulnerabilities. Like years later finding that specific key was generated incorrectly.

Sounds like planned obsolescence if devices stop working after 5 years or less.

Only for devices that do not allow you to patch the CA bundle as an aftermarket repair. Call your representative and demand Right to Repair legislation.

That is ... basically all of them? Other than general purpose desktop/laptop computers that is. Show me a TV or smartphone that does allow you to push new roots to it...

And your clients are right. The "security" community's wanton disregard for backwards compatibility is abhorrent.

Well, how the vendor was going to apply other security updates if they cannot update their basic security trust store?

If the vendor is really unable to update, then it's at best negligence when designing the product, and at worst -- planned obsolescence.

Yeah, participation in web tls requires the ability to regularly update your server and client code.

Nothing stays the same forever, software is never done. It’s absurd pretend otherwise.

1. Ship the product with automatic updates delivered over https

2. Product is a smart fridge or whatever, reasonable users might keep it offline for 5+ years.

3. New homeowner connects it to the internet.

4. Security update fails because the security update server's SSL cert isn't signed by a trusted root.

The real solution is making your shit modifiable by the client.

We do car recalls all the time. Just send out an email or something with instructions of what to put on a USB, it's basically the same thing.

Yes it's inconvenient for consumers and annoying but the alternative is worse. Essentially hard coding certificates was always a bad idea.

> I'm quite surprised the CA/Browser Forum went for this.

The CA folks and the Browser folks may have had differences of opinions.

You think? :)

Yes. Mozilla presumably want this rent-seeking industry of useless middleman to disappear.

Downvoted by rent-seeking useless middlemen, presumably

The CA/BF has a history of terrible decisions, for example 2020's "Baseline Requirements for the Issuance and Management of Publicly-Trusted Code Signing Certificates".

Microsoft voted for it, and now they are basically the only game in town for cloud signing that is affordable for individuals. The Forum needs voting representatives for software developers and end users or else the members will just keep enriching themselves at our expense.

How is the CA/B forum relevant for code signing certificates?

How are they not? :)

They set the baseline standard for code signing certificates. In 2020 they added the requirement to use hardware modules which resulted in much higher prices and fewer small developers opting to sign their code.

They won't adopt Acme, as once a customer adopts it, the effort to transition to a new (free) provider is almost zero.

I expect they will introduce new, "more secure", proprietary methods, and ride the vendor lock-in until the paid certificate industries death.

Free providers have limits and this new time limitation will also play into that as there will be many more certificates to renew.

Large companies will keep on using paid providers also for business continuity in case free provider will fail. Also I don’t know what kind of SLA you have on let’s encrypt.

It is more complicated than „oh it is free let’s move on”.

Most every modern "big company" I have worked for is leveraging LetsEncrypt in some capacity where appropriate; some definitely more than others. I don't think you're completely wrong but I also think you're being a bit dismissive.

I hope everyone will adopt ACME I still have to send CSR to the customers and they send me cert back. It is okish once a year.

There are 2 and GTS is also technically free. Just hard to use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com