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Let's Encrypt Announces New-Certificate-Every-6-Days Offering
(letsencrypt.org)
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this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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What is the use case or benefit for the server admin?
as a server admin I wouldn't want to keep renewing my cert.
can anyone help to explain?
Lets Encrypt certs tend to be renewed by a cronjob, anyway. The advantage is that if someone gets your cert without your knowledge, they have, at most, six days to make use of it.
If they get it without your knowledge, what are the odds they can get the new one too?
If they got it with your knowledge, can't you just revoke the old one?
Yeah, but unfortunately cert revocation isn't that great in practice. Lots of devices and services don't even check the revocation lists on every connection.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
I've been using the Swiss Cheese Model for my sandwiches and they've been a disaster.
You have to scramble the slices, otherwise the holes all line up and your mayonnaise falls out.
6 days to do what you want to do to the page and its visitors. I guess that's good?
It would be six days at max, assuming they managed to steal the certificate immediately after it was issued, otherwise it's gonna be even less.
Having the certificate doesn't automatically mean you can change the site, if you have control of the site hosting you likely wouldn't need to steal the cert anyway.
Stealing the certificate would allow you to run a man in the middle type attack but that's inevitably going to be very limited in scope. The shorter time limit on the cert reduces that scope even further, which is great.
Since most Let's Encrypt certs will have an automated renewal process this doesn't even really change the overhead of setup so I think this move makes a lot of sense.
There are other things certificates can be used for as well of course but I'm just going off your example.