I recently purchased an yearly wildcard SSL certificate and was notified that the certificate needs to be resigned every 200 days, why!?
They usually grow enormous bureaucratic theatre around long-lived cert renewal, leaving them unable to do rapid rotation when it is required. And rather than getting their shit together, they prefer suing their CA to avoid revocation.
Given that those organisations 1) are crucial for day-to-day life (like banks, or the government), and 2) would have a giant blast radius when their certs are compromised, and 3) won't voluntarily change, the only remaining option to keep the ecosystem healthy is to force them by making complex rotation processes extremely painful and cumbersome to keep.
Hence: automated renewal, and boil the frog by slowly lowering the validity period.
Also amusing to see some organizations using ACME cert tools manually on each and every server in fleets of 10 to 100, every 80 days or so, when they remember to do so. Outages tend to be pretty frequent due to missed renewals.
The only solution is automation, whether with an off the shelf ACME client with a cron job or a more complete automation platform. Let's Encrypt is not the only CA that supports automation, there are quite a few that support ACME or other nonstandard APIs. There is almost no setup that cannot be fully automated: legacy web servers, hardware load balancers, cloud load balancers, etc.
It is also absolutely possible to automate OV and EV renovation if an organization insists on these "fancy" certs, which are frankly irrelevant to security because browsers do not treat them differently in any significant way. You can't pin a domain to only OV or EV type certs, which would be useful. The documents used for validation need to be updated periodically (data reuse times are going down too), but the rest of the process can be fully automated.
I do not see any reason not to automate cert renewal given the changes in lifetimes, although I feel for the hobby server operators who have to deal with more complexity. For hobby use cases, just set up an ACME client with a cron job and be done with it.
stares at that one IE6 interface in that one box in that particular network
i cant be the only one
In aggregate this is a very good thing
It’s easier than ever to run “smaller services”. You don’t even need to pay for a TLS certificate.
The original idea of these certs, that they're very valuable long-lived secrets that have to be carefully hand managed and protected, while simultaneously being accessible to your active infrastructure, was always going to be too brittle. The idea of short-lived secrets that are regularly reissued allows for much more robust validation and less catastrophic failure modes.
I'm generally not dogmatic about this kind of thing and think there are often multiple right answers. But short-lived webpki certs are one of those things where if people don't see the value, I'm convinced they're not thinking about security correctly.
In the past a long-lived EV certificate changing was notable/interesting from a security standpoint. Short-lived certificates just mean anyone who can break into your domain registrar (easy) can create an identical certificate and none of your key storage or security matters.
An attacker who manages to get a cert provider to mint a new certificate for your domain might be able to appear legitimate, but remember that it's a new cert, not an identical one to the cert you already have. You as the domain owner can easily detect this new cert was created using CT logs and visitors to your site can potentially detect two certs for the same domain depending on whether the attacker can convince them to only visit the spoofed site. Short lived certificates also mean the attacker must execute their new cert attack frequently if they want longer term success.
On the other hand, an attacker who manages to penetrate your impenetrable personal cert management security measures now has the real cert they can use to pretend to be you for as long as your certificate is good for. And unless you detected their one-time break-in, there is no way for you or anyone else to tell this is happening since the attacker is using a cert that matches the real one byte for byte.
Edit: I forgot to mention that short-lived certs are also a response to the general challenge with certificate revocation mechanisms as a reliable way to respond to the unlikely event that you actually detected your long-lived cert was stolen. Even if you figured out an attacker stole your certificate, convincing users to not keep treating it as valid has a lot of interesting failure edge cases. You might just have to wait for its validity period to expire.
Precisely because of busywork and process fragility that they invented, with a strictly negative benefit for security and end-users.
Can you propose another path to address this issue?
Now, if you want to play with the world at large that's been dealing with security issue after security issue then you play by those rules.
You can't come to my game then get mad when I have a set of rules you don't like.
That or either get a democracy to agree with you and vote, or become a dictator.
The CA/B is the embodiment of the phrase "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".