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?
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.
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.
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.
Since I set up a https website (lemmy) and had to deal with the hassle of certificates, I do wonder why you need another entity to churn out what's basically a RSA key pair?
Is it this you must trust the government again or is there some better reasons for it?
It's to make sure you're actually reaching your intended endpoint. If I'm visiting a site for the first time, how do I know I actually have THEIR certificate? If it's self generated, anybody could sign a certificate claiming to be anybody else. The current system is to use authority figures who validate certificates are owned by the site you're trying to visit. This means you have a secure connection AND know you're interacting with the correct site.
I understand their reasoning behind this, but I am not sure, this is such a good idea. Imagine Letsencrypt having technical issues or getting DDoS'd. If the certificates are valid for 90 days and are typically renewed well in advance, no real problem arises, but with only 6 days in total, you really can't renew them all that much in advance, so this risk of lots of sites having expired certificates in such a situation appears quite large to me.
I volunteer to help with IT at a makerspace, and I hesitate to go for 6 day expiration times. As volunteers, we can't always fix problems in a timely way like paid IT staff could. We try to automate the hell out of everything, but certs have gone a day or two without getting updated before.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
