Quick reminder from your friendly local SRE: never ever issue certificates that expire on weekends. Make certs expire in the middle of the afternoon on a business day wherever your operators live and work. The cert in question expires at May 30 10:48:38 2020 GMT, which smells suspiciously like a fixed time after the cert was generated, rather than at a well-chosen point in time.
All my applications use a component that watches certs configured (everything in cert and trust store) and returns warning in telemetry from the application if any of the certificates is less than a week from expiration. This is checked periodically while the application runs.
This not only makes sure we don't miss expiration but also ensures we don't forget to configure any of the application.
We had a situation when the cert was replaced but the file was placed in incorrect path and was not actually used by the app. Having the app report on what is actually being in use is the best way to prevent this from ever happening.
Me too! Especially with the short expiration times of LetsEncrypt. But I really don't want to put `nginx -s reload` in the Cron, in case I'm tinkering with the configs and they're suddenly live (which only really happens at staging or at home of course, but still).
That's what I usually do. My problem is that I might be adding a location and nginx reloads between that and adding access restrictions (i.e. because I took a break to google).
After one scrambling emergency with a cert expiring in the middle of the day, a constant check with warnings and alerts a couple of weeks before expiry made a matter of defensive organization into something trivial.
Engineering for failure is important, you should always set yourself up so that you have several lines of defence which can fail. Some lines of defence to make failing "impossible" others to make a fail softer, even when you think failing is impossible.
Great tip. Did you notice that cert in this case was issued 20 years ago? It’s crazy to me that it was still being used to sign certs as recently as last week (according to twitter)
Of course, but that doesn't really excuse them. My first experience with middle-of-Sunday-night SSL certificate expiration was in December 1998, and it was already a well-known doctrine by then. I'd expect a commercial certificate authority to have these kinds of things squared away.
It's actually worse. The new root (good I believe until 2038) uses the same key as the now expired certificate. It has to or it would not be possible to validate the certificates that were issued. And this new one is a root certificate installed in browsers!
What "should" happen is that no certificate should be issued with an expiration date later than the issuing certificate. Then as the issuing certificate gets closer to expiration, a new one, with a new key pair, should be created and this new certificate should sign subordinate certificates.
Sorry to reply to my own comment. But I want to clarify. Two certificates (at least) expired. The root named "AddTrust External CA Root" and a subordinate certificate with a subject of "USERTrust RSA Certification Authority." Both expired around the same time.
The "USERTrust RSA Certification Authority" certificate signed yet another layer of intermediate certificates.
The "USERTrust RSA Certification Authority" certificate was promoted to a self-signed certificate, now in the browser trust stores, using the same key pair as the original certificate that was signed by "AddTrust External CA Root." It has an expiration of 2038 (although that concept is a bit vague in a root certificate).
There's actually a third certificate for "USERTrust RSA Certification Authority", also using the same key pair, signed by a different root called "AAA Certificate Services". It looks like the intended replacement for the expiring one is this one, rather than the one where it's the root itself.
It is explicitly not a replacement, but some kind of legacy fallback that they don't want you to use, but exists for enterprise customers that absolutely can't get trust.
That's what my browser shows me too, but it's just because it's ignoring the cross-signed one that chains to AAA. The server is sending it, per InCommon's setup instructions.
The old TLS (versions 1.0, 1.1, 1.2) specifications said that the certificates supplied are to form a chain, starting from a leaf and leading back towards a root.
Pretty much all clients assume that once they can see a way to a root they trust they'll give up following the provided chain and trust that - but sadly not all of them, so "over-specifying" the chain can cause problems.
Modern clients tend to go further, they still assume the first certificate is a leaf, but all other certificates are just potential hints that might be helpful in working out an acceptable trust path. TLS 1.3 actually specifies that clients must tolerate certificates supplied on this basis rather than a strict "chain".
I'm actually surprised at the number of claimed clients which don't have vaguely modern trust stores but do understand SHA256.
> I'm actually surprised at the number of claimed clients which don't have vaguely modern trust stores but do understand SHA256.
All the clients were limited to SHA-1 have already been forced off https; CAs in the CA/Browser forum weren't permitted to issue SHA-1 certs valid past Jan 1 2017, and you had to have gotten those issued before Jan 1 2016. Browsers were showing warnings on SHA-1 certs depending on expiration throughout 2015, so you had to either put up with a warning (and the customer service burden thereof), ditch your old clients and go sha-2 only, segregate traffic, or build custom software to send sha-1 certs to some people and sha-2 certs to others.
Microsoft added support for sha-2 certs in the OS system stack with XP Service Pack 3, released in 2008, and Microsoft was always pretty slow with support on things, other platforms may have supported this earlier. A CA bundle from like 2005-2008 is going to be fairly limiting today. A lot of CAs back then had a 20 year validity period, which may have started 5-10 years before the bundle date. Of course, a lot of bundles today end in 2038, so we'll be screwed then.
Certificates issued with this CA will have been cross-signed by the newer root certificate, but our CA (Sectigo) was sending the old chain in issuing emails as late as April this year, despite the cross-signed root being available for a long time.
For long-lived certificates they will outlive your calendar tech. The bit rot leave maybe the events fine, but anything fancier like notifications will fad away.
Source: BTDT 3 times in 7 years, and it was all with "Big Enterprise" grade products.
If you were to issue certs for short durations, and also maintain a calendar of cert expiry, those certs could be renewed in a timely manner.
In other scenarios where one would want to issue fresh certificates (receiving Ops control from other orgs, credentials refresh for what ever reason), one can still do so without waiting for the current certificates to expire.
I am just of the opinion that "make it expire in the afternoon" doesn't apply to root certificates that are used across the entire world (i.e. - the topic of discussion)
This one bit me today and abruptly ended my day at the beach.
The certificate reseller advised my customer that it was okay to include the cross-signing cert in the chain, because browsers will automatically ignore it once it expires, and use the Comodo CA root instead.
And that was true for browsers I guess. But my customer also has about 100 machines in the field that use cURL to access their HTTPS API endpoint. cURL will throw an error if one of the certs in the chain has expired (may be dependent on the order, don't know).
Anyway, 100 machines went down and I had a stressed out customer on the phone.
HTTP clients in programming languages are not as smart as web browsers when it comes to verifying SSL certificate chains. For example, if the chain presented by the server is missing intermediate certificates, modern web browsers are able to fetch those intermediate certificates without issue. Most HTTP clients do not do that though, and instead will throw a cryptic error, something along the lines of "unable to get local issuer certificate". This is known as a 'incomplete chain' error.
Earlier this year I added SSL verification to a website uptime monitoring service I run (https://www.watchsumo.com/docs/ssl-tls-monitoring) and it wasn't anywhere near as simple as I thought it would be. There's so many edge cases regarding verification, and languages usually don't expose the full errors in exceptions, then you have errors like this which only affect a subset of clients.
Sounds like a good test case for exercising those otherwise useless "million dollar insurances" that some certificate vendors flash in their sales materials?
Yes, it's useless insurance. The interesting thing is that useless insurance is illegal to sell in lots of places† - to consumers, but here the insurance was sold to the root CAs which are huge corporations so they don't care that it's useless because they only bought it as a PR exercise.
†This is the root of a huge scandal in the UK that resulted in banks refunding people years of fees for a product called PPI which they should never have been sold. As a secondary effect this resulted in annoying spam from firms who'd help you claim your money back. By the end I almost felt sad I hadn't fallen for the original scam, because I was being inconvenienced by all the spam but (since I hadn't lost anything) not getting a pile of cash as a refund.
I had this problem with mediaarea.net. Actually, cURL and openssl s_client didn’t complain, but wget and APT failed because a certificate in one of the certification paths had expired. Had to contact them to fix it.
When I started getting reports from customers on my company's website about issues, I was baffled for a few minutes because all my tests with OpenSSL and cURL, etc. were passing...on my Arch Linux install. Then I switched over to my MacBook and ran the official /usr/bin/curl version (instead of my brew install curl version) and I understood what was happening. Gotta love when this happens.
My guess is openssl, since we experienced this problem with a lot of our internal services and our monitoring, both of which make heavy use of Perl and LWP::UserAgent, which build on OpenSSL. CentOS 7 boxes had problems (easily shown through the lwp-request util, which can often be used like curl's CLI tool), but not on CentOS 8.
Honestly, certificates should never expire or should expire daily. If certificate revocation works then its pointless to have expiring certs. Its just a mechanism for CAs to seek rent.
If certificate revocation doesnt work then certs need to expire super frequently to limit potential damage if compromised.
A certificate that expires in 20 years does absolutely nothing for security compared to a certificate that never expires. Odds are that in 20 years the crypto will need to be updated anyways, effectively revoking the certificate.
Exactly. Certificate expiration has never really been about security. It's purely for practicality, so that CRLs won't grow without bound.
This is especially true now that we have OCSP stapling. From a security perspective, a short-lived certificate is exactly equivalent to a long-lived certificate with mandatory OCSP stapling and a short-lived OCSP response, but the latter is much more complicated.
And in this case since it's a root, it goes even further than that. Root CA's can't be revoked anyway, so if they're compromised, a software update to distrust it is required. There's really not a good reason for them to expire at all.
Expiration is not “just” about cryptographic risk either; there are plenty of operational risks. If you’re putting your server on the Internet, and exposing a service, you should be worried about key compromise, whether by hacker or by Heartbleed. Lifetimes are a way of expressing, and managing, that risk, especially in a world where revocation has a host of failure modes (operational, legal/political, interoperability) that may not be desirable.
As for Root expiration, it’s definitely more complicated than being black and white. It’s a question about whether software should fail-secure (fail-closed) or fail-insecure (fail-open). The decision to trust a CA, by a software vendor, is in theory backed by a variety of evidence, such as the CA’s policies and practices, as well as additional evidence such as audits. On expiration, under today’s model, all of those requirements largely disappear; the CA is free to do whatever they want with the key. Rejecting expired roots is, in part, a statement that what is secure now can’t be guaranteed as secure in 5 years, or 10 years, or 6 months, whatever the vendor decides. They can choose to let legacy software continue to work, but insecurely, potentially laying the accidental groundwork for the botnets of tomorrow, or they can choose to have legacy software stop working then, on the assumption that if they were receiving software updates, they would have received an update to keep things working / extend the timer.
Ultimately, this is what software engineering is: balancing these tradeoffs, both locally and in the broader ecosystem, to try and find the right balance.
I don't see anything about expiration in that talk.
If you don't have a strong revocation system, then your host is vulnerable whether or not you have expiration, since attackers aren't going to wait until the day before your key expires to try to steal it.
In general, when a CA's root certificate expires, it creates a new one and gives it to browser and OS vendors. What's the difference between the CA continuing to guard their old private key, and starting to guard the new private key?
> If you don't have a strong revocation system, then your host is vulnerable whether or not you have expiration, since attackers aren't going to wait until the day before your key expires to try to steal it.
We don't have a strong revocation system. Maybe one day OSCP stapling will be mandatory, although OSCP signatures are reusable within an expiration window, so we still have the question of expiration.
> In general, when a CA's root certificate expires, it creates a new one and gives it to browser and OS vendors. What's the difference between the CA continuing to guard their old private key, and starting to guard the new private key?
Their new key is fresh --- the public key hasn't been floating around being factored for the last 20 years. Maybe it's longer too. It certainly wouldn't be on disk of hardware they discarded before the new key was generated. Of course, they should have taken proper precautions with their discarded hardware, but maybe someone slipped up.
Frequent expiration is a way of limiting the damage of key theft, not a way to prevent it. In some (many?) cases, key theft is not detected, so limiting the amount of time it could be used is helpful.
OTOH, what do you do for devices which are shipped with a CA bundle, and never updated. They may be a problem for other reasons, but at some point, they don't have any valid roots and they turn into a pumpkin. (Fun times if the manufacturer realizes and tries to update, but doesn't get the update distributed before the certs expire; there was an Amazon Kindle update like that once).
It’s not either/or expiration vs revocation; they are the same thing. Expiration is natural revocation and a ceiling function to the overall cost.
The statement “when a CA’s root certificate expires, it creates a new one” is not a general statement. That’s the exception, rather than the rule, as evidenced by just watching the changes to root stores over the past 30 years. More CAs have left the CA business / folded / been acquired than have carried on. A classic example of this is the AOL root, for which the long-standing scuttlebutt is that no one knows what happened to the key after AOL exited the CA business. The reason it’s scuttlebutt, as opposed to being a Sky is falling DigiNotar, is that the certificate expired. Or, for that matter, look at how many CAs have been distrusted. Expiration fits as a natural bound for legacy software that doesn’t receive updates, failing-secure rather than failing insecurely.
It isn’t, but then again, in 1995 we might have said the same for expirations in 2015, and yet so, so many poorly managed CAs were expunged in the past 5 years.
A healthy root store would set revocation at a much more aggressive period; say, every five years. Every three years, the CA applies to have their new root trusted, which gives two years to distribute that root to clients that need it, while having the old root sign the new root, to support an immediate transition to the new root. Among other things, this encourages a more robust and healthy CA ecosystem, because you don’t end up with lopsided balances based on “who has the oldest root.” That imbalance encouraged poor behavior which got CAs distrusted, in the past, because they behaved in a manner that assumed they were too big, by virtue of being too ubiquitous, to fail.
Someone on Twitter (forgot whom, maybe swiftonsecurity?) suggested lately in a tongue-in-cheek way that the certs should not hard-expire, but instead add an exponentially-increasing slowdown at TLS handshake.
Once the slowdown is too big, someone will notice and have a look.
I don't understand how this is relevant. We're talking about a deterministic timeout, based on the diff between cert exp date and current date.
If Chrome added e.g. a 20 second slowdown to connect to the page for every user in the world one day after the cert expired, surely there would be some users who would ping the company that the site is unbearably slow (on social media, by email, whatever). Or someone in the company would notice. Or analytics would drop like hell.
Myriads of ways how a non-abandoned website would learn about it directly or indirectly.
Of course that seems like a giant hack, but a grace period of 1-7 days with browsers doing something less scary than a giant error screen would be more than welcome.
My point, such as it was, is that at present the workfactor penalty favours less-effective crypto, the opposite of the suggestion.
Of course a specifically-implemented timeout might be incorporated. That faces the challenge of bad actors (or incompetent / unaware ones) bypassing such a mechanism.
Incorporating the cost into the algorithm itself (say; requiring, more rounds based on time since first release, according to a mandatory and well-estabished protocol, just off the top of my head, with both client and server agreeing on minimum required rounds) might work.
To revoke a certificate you must keep a list of revoked certificates. Without expiration date that list would grow infinitely. And that list should be downloaded periodically by every entity which wants to verify certificate.
They said "certificates should never expire or should expire daily". Roots already can't be revoked, so they should never expire. Intermediates and leaves should expire daily. Since currently, OCSP responses are often valid for that long, there'd be no need for revocation anymore then.
What if your CA is down for a day?
Imagine let's encrypt being down for 24 hours and all if it's certificates going invalid.
That would be millions of websites unavailable..
This is no different than an OCSP server going down for a day. Either the site becomes unreachable, or clients take a risk by accepting a certificate that might be revoked.
My point is that connecting with OCSP down carries the exact same risk that accepting an expired certificate does. In both cases, the risk is that the certificate might have been revoked without you knowing it.
If I operate a website, I might have some confidence that my key hasn't been stolen in the last year. But I might have much less confidence that my key hasn't been stolen in the last 20 years.
Certificate expiration means I don't need to worry about that second case.
That’s only true if your key is regenerated each time you request an updated certificate. This is not mandatory, and there are lots of guides on the internet for generating a csr from an existing key.
Sure but I don't think that's generally done or recommended. I think people only do that if they have certificate pinning, which on the web is pretty rare and getting rarer as browsers drop support for HPKP.
I tend to agree. Seems dealing with expiration dates is just another burden without real security. If something goes wrong you have to revoke now and not wait for another year until the cert expires.
At the core, this is not a problem with the server, or the CA, but with the clients. However, servers have to deal with broken clients, so it’s easy to point at the server and say it was broken, or to point at the server and say it’s fixed, but that’s not quite the case.
I discussed this some in https://twitter.com/sleevi_/status/1266647545675210753 , as clients need to be prepared to discover and explore alternative certificate paths. Almost every major CA relies on cross-certificates, some even with circular loops (e.g. DigiCert), and clients need to be capable of exploring those certificates and finding what they like. There’s not a single canonical “correct” certificate chain, because of course different clients trust different CAs.
Of course, using shorter lived certificates, and automating them, also helps prepare your servers, by removing the toil from configuring changes and making sure you pickup updates (to the certificate path) in a timely fashion.
Tools like Censys can be used to explore the certificate graph and visualize the nodes and edges. You’ll see plenty of sites rely on this, and that means clients need to not be lazy in how they verify certificates. Or, alternatively, that root stores should impose more rules on how CAs sign such cross-certificates, to reduce the risk posed to the ecosystem by these events.
Given you mention OpenSSL is currently terrible at verifying "real" certificates: why doesn't e.g. Google just throw a bit of money at them and fix their bugs when they're clearly so well-known? It seems like such an obvious thing to do for a company whose entire business is built on the web. Is there really too little benefit to justify the cost of the engineer(s) it would take even for big companies? Or are the projects somehow blocking help?
You shouldn't need to send the root certificate (unless the clients are _really_ dumb, but I worked with a lot of dumb clients, and did not see any issues with only sending intermediates and the entity cert), but a fair number of cert chain verifiers are fairly dumb and won't stop when they get to a root they know which makes things tricky.
If some of your clients don't have the UserTrust CA, but do have the AddTrust CA, up until today, you probably wanted to include the UserTrust CA cert signed by AddTrust. Clients with the UserTrust CA should see that the intermediate cert is signed by UserTrust and not even read that cross signed cert, but many do see the cross signed cert and then make the trust decision based on the AddTrust CA.
It's hard to identify clients in the TLS handshake to give them a cert chain tailored to their individual needs; there's some extensions for CA certs supported, but they're largely unused.
It depends what clients you need to support. ssllabs test for the server will tell you which ones you're compatible with. You may get some surprises with old Androids and XP. (whether you're interested in being available to them is another question)
Any guess at what percentage is this versus the case where these certs are cross-signed with a newer root but older clients with outdated bundles do not trust the newer root?
(At Cronitor, we saw about a 10% drop in traffic, presumably from those with outdated bundles)
Hard to say, as we don't have any insights into the client-side. But we can say that only ~2% of our clients had expiring root certificates in their chain in the last few weeks, so it's definitely a minority.
Since you don't control the clients in anyway, it might be that there are clients that haven't updated their local certificate stores in ages and don't yet trust the new root certificates.
I have never really wanted to go "serverless" until today.
TIL that I can buy a cert that expires in a year that is signed by a root certificate that expires sooner. Still not sure WHY this is the case, but this is definitely the case.
It’s the PKI paradigm that creates most of the insanity. Authentication is still an unsolved issue with PKI, there’s many ways that you can perform authentication, but all of the different approaches lead to one form of insanity or another. The CA system has its share of insanity, but it is the most successful PKI implementation in history, and by a long way.
PKI authentication is only insane when delegated to a third party. There is a built-in assumption within the CA system that no two parties can ever trust each other and intermediaries are always needed. A world of strangers who never learn anything about or get to know each other. It is either impractical or impossible for the first party to trust the second, using this system, without third party intervention. What reason is there that a website owner should never send a CSR to an end user who creates her own CA cert? Why are third parties the only ones permitted by websites to sign their certificates? Welcome to the world wide web of middlemen.
Well you can’t perform authentication over an insecure channel, and you can’t have a secure channel without authentication. Either you trust an authority, or you authenticate manually yourself. There’s a reason TLS uses the CA system, and not PGP.
You can authenticate outside of the insecure channel. There is a real world outside of the internet.
It is this "manual authentication" that the CA system does not account for. It is not an option. Why is it that, in practice, the only certificates an end user's "CA" can sign are the end user's server certificates?
> You can authenticate outside of the insecure channel. There is a real world outside of the internet.
Exactly, and you can look at how much of a failure PGP has been to see how successful that approach is.
> Why is it that, in practice, the only certificates an end user's "CA" can sign are the end user's server certificates?
CAs can sign any X.509 certificate. They only authenticate domain control or business ownership (via “EV”), though. CA certs also aren’t only used for TLS. You can get a code signing cert from a CA for instance.
You can write a very long list of perfectly valid complaints about the CA system. However it is undeniably the most successful PKI ever implemented, and not just by a little bit.
This isn’t because CAs are bad at what they do. It’s because there is absolutely no elegant solution to that problem. If you want to authenticate identity manually, then I wish you luck finding one or two other people to join you. If you want to securely communicate with people you don’t know personally, or who don’t know how to/can’t be bothered to maintain their own set of private keys, then you’re going to need to establish trust via a 3rd party authority.
Please explain how a user who creates a CA pem file with openssl can sign the certificate from example.com. Not a faked up certificate for example.com but the real one the owner of the example.com domain name got from Digicert.
If the owner of the example.com website creates the CSR and send its to the user, then the result is not "faked up". I use the term "faked up" only to refer to a scenario where the user generates a CSR for a domain name that is not under her control.
As far as I understand your certificate is still valid but you need to remove the intermediate certificate from your bundle. That was the case for me anyway.
If your traffic comes from a browser you are fine with this but if you're coming from e.g. Curl you will find that you need to include an intermediate chain.
(The reason for the difference being that browser stay up to date, many old client systems do not.)
We ended up getting a new cert from a different provider.
You only need to remove the cert if you want to support buggy clients. If none of your clients are buggy, it will be fine to leave the expired cert in the chain.
That’s not the case — all certs are cross-signed with a newer root. The real problem is that certificate issuers have been giving people the old CA chain instead of the new one.
Yep. Got woken up early today for this. We renewed our cert about a month and two days ago. Namecheap, the vendor, sent us the bad AddTrust cert in the bundle. They weren't updating the bundles until two days after we renewed the cert.
Same exact thing happened to me (Namecheap, PositiveSSL, renewed roughly a month ago). I went the reissue route on Namecheap and that fixed it (and I ended up with a certificate chain that is one certificate shorter).
Datadog has shit the bed for us multiple times in the last six months. Unannounced breaking API changes, unaddressed bugs, and now their embedded cert expired.
Our org is currently divided over further commitment to the service, or leaving them entirely. They've made it very hard to argue in their favor.
Their pricing doesn't scale well either, IMO. We have several hundred hosts running and for some of the smaller instance types it costs just as much to monitor than it does to run the entire machine.
Datadog failed, and our WAF provider failed at the same time too (internal services). It was .. rather confusing at it seemed like the sky was falling D: .
Thanks for mentioning this, since it caused me to go check metrics and find they weren't coming in... Luckily only a couple of my alarms come from metrics via the agent itself.
IMO, there's a bit of a design flaw with curl here. There should be an easy flag to say "trust the particular certificate with this hash, no matter what's wrong with it", but there isn't, so people instead use the one that says "trust whatever certificate you get, no matter what's wrong with it".
If you're rotating a self-signed certificate, then how do you suppose that clients securely trust it? Or if you just mean replacing it when it expires, then this could instead be tied to the underlying public key alone, which can be reused.
Yikes.. yeah, if you're going to do this, consider wrapping it in an `if (date < 2020-06-15)` and be sure to fix it properly before then. This reduces the ability to just forget about it (or have the fix constantly deprioritized) and leave your software with a security vulnerablty.
Edit: for https://www.circuitlab.com/ we saw all Stripe webhooks failing from 4:08am through 12:04pm PDT today with "TLS error". Since 12:04pm (5 minutes ago), some webhooks are succeeding and others are still failing.
Edit 2: since 12:17pm all webhooks are succeeding again. Thanks Stripe!
For backwards compatibility, I updated our intermediate certificates to provide the AAA Certificate Services signing https://censys.io/certificates/68b9c761219a5b1f0131784474665... to replace the expired 2nd intermediate certificate. (Modifying the "GandiStandardSSLCA2.pem" file in my case.)
I was wondering why Lynx started spouting some nonsense:
$ lynx -dump https://wiki.factorio.com/Version_history
Looking up wiki.factorio.com
Making HTTPS connection to wiki.factorio.com
SSL callback:certificate has expired, preverify_ok=0, ssl_okay=0
Retrying connection without TLS.
Looking up wiki.factorio.com
Making HTTPS connection to wiki.factorio.com
SSL callback:certificate has expired, preverify_ok=0, ssl_okay=0
Alert!: Unable to make secure connection to remote host.
lynx: Can't access startfile https://wiki.factorio.com/Version_history
Are we going to experience the same bug next year for all LetsEncrypt certificates when the DST Root CA X3 expires? I guess modern devices could deal with LetsEncrypt issuing directly from their own modern ISRG Root X1, but would that leave legacy clients completely stranded (iOS <10, older versions of Windows and Android...?)
You'll get two different but related bugs but yes, assuredly something will break and somebody will be angry about it.
The first thing that'll happen is Let's Encrypt's systems will tell systems by default to present certificate chains which don't mention DST Root CA X3. Lots of systems will, as a result, automatically switch to such a chain when renewing and you'll see a gentle trickle of weird bugs over ~90 days starting this summer unless Let's Encrypt moves the date.
Those bugs will be from clients that somehow in 2020 both didn't trust the ISRG root and couldn't imagine their way to using a different trust path not presented by the server. Somebody more expert in crap certificate verification software can probably tell you exactly which programs will fail and how.
Then there will be months of peace in which seemingly everything is now fine.
Then in September 2021 the other shoe drops. Clients that didn't trust ISRG but had managed to cobble together their own trust path to DST Root CA X3 now notice it has expired on services which present a modern chain or no chain at all.
Those sites which deliberately used the legacy DST Root CA X3 chain to buy a few more months of compatibility likewise see errors, but hopefully they at least knew this was coming and are expecting it.
But there are also sites using crappy ACME clients that didn't obey the spec. They've hard coded DST Root CA X3 not because they wanted compatibility at all costs and are prepared for it to end in September, but because they just pasted together whatever seemed to work without obeying the ACME spec and so even though Let's Encrypt's servers have told them not to use that old certificate chain they aren't listening. Those services now mysteriously break too, even in some relatively modern clients that would trust ISRG, because the service is presenting a chain that insists on DSR Root CA X3 and they aren't smart enough to ignore that.
On the upside, lots of Let's Encrypt certs are just to make somebody's web site work, and an ordinary modern web browser has been battle-tested against this crap for years, so it will soldier on.
Some users on Safari (probably old versions) appear to be getting bad cert warnings for https://www.playsaurus.com. REALLY glad I found this post here, it was driving me nuts.
yes, a bunch of older clusters were affected by this. They included an intermediate of USERTrust that was signed by AddTrust, clients that didn't check for alternate chains would then fail. We pushed the new chain (which now only includes the server cert and the Sectigo RSA cert), and dynamically reloaded the TLS listener in RabbitMQ, it should have solved it for most ppl, email support@cloudamqp.com if it didn't for you. We're sorry we didn't pushed this earlier. We were aware that the AddTrust would expire during the life time of the server certificate, but we assumed that all TLS client would find the valid chain regardless, that assumption was obviously wrong.
This just hit me via Debian's 'apt-get update': I'm using jitsi's package repository which is hosted via HTTPS and seems to rely on the expired root-CA. Certificate checks started failing for everybody a few hours ago [1].
That's quite bad, as I tried to do a clean re-install of jitsi-meet, and now I have no installation at all any more.
While Android 2.3 Gingerbread does not have the modern roots installed and relies on AddTrust, it also does not support TLS 1.2 or 1.3, and is unsupported and labelled obsolete by the vendor.
If the platform doesn’t support modern algorithms (SHA-2, for example) then you will need to speak to that system vendor about updates.
I find things like that really really irritating. Crypto is basically maths, and a very pure form at that, so should be one of the most portable types of software in existence. Computers have been doing maths since before they were machines. Instead, the forced obolescence bandwagon has made companies take this very pure and portable technology and tied it to their platform's versions, using the "security" argument to bait and coerce users into taking other unwanted changes, and possibly replacing hardware that is otherwise functional (and, as mentioned earlier, is perfectly capable of executing the relevant code) along with all the ecological impact that has. Adding new root certificates at least for PCs is rather easy due to their extreme portability, but I wish the same could be said of crypto algorithms/libraries.
You're mad at the wrong people. The security argument is legitimate, so there's no need for your scare quotes. The weaknesses in TLS older than 1.2 are real. You should instead be upset at device vendors for deciding to drop support for devices so quickly. If they'd just keep supplying updates, or even open-source everything so the community could, then this wouldn't be an issue.
You could ship better crypto (and updated CAs) with your app for Android -- then you could get support for whatever you like on all versions. But it might not use hardware acceleration if available, and hardware running Gingerbread needs crypto acceleration if available. TLS 1.3 isn't all that much code if you can use the system x.509 and system ciphers, or maybe pick one or two ciphers to ship if they're not there; I'd guess TLS 1.2 isn't that much code either, the complexity comes from trying to support lots of versions -- and from X.509 which has a lot of stuff to process.
I think Chrome for Android did include TLS 1.2 at least, when it was shipping for Gingerbread.
These days, Android 2.3 Gingerbread devices are essentially obsolete even from a strictly hardware point of view. Most of those were actually very well supported by the old CyanogenMod releases, but few people would even bother trying to bring up something reasonably modern like pmOS by building on that work, the specs are just that bad.
Thankfully our uptime services spotted this earlier in the week. I'm terrible with certs, so no idea why a cert we brought this year is even using this root ca.
To be honest, things like let's encrypt or cloud services which manage ssl is a great help
We had our CI systems fail today because of this. They were running Ubuntu 16.04. Check the below thread, they say an openssl bug is also a contributing factor. Removing the expired root CA fixed the issue for me. (edit: removed from the clients)
Everything is fine with PKI and SSL certificates. It was a bug in OpenSSL 1.0.1 / 1.0.2 in dealing with two times cross-signed root CA. It is fixed in 1.1.1, but these older versions are still default on RHEL6/RHEL7/Centos6/Centos7 and even Ubuntu16.04.
I think a large portion of online communications have been affected today.
We had to get an entirely new certificate to resolve this. We had recently migrated our docker images to be based on Amazon Linux 2, and low a behold, there was no easy way we found to upgrade to the required version of OpenSSL on Amazon Linux 2. Was easier to just upgrade our certificates
ip-api.com was also affected by this.
After our first alert at 10:49 (cert expired at 10:48:38) and a minute of being puzzled as to why our certificate expired, we realized the root we bundled is the issue. We finished updating our primary API servers at 10:55.
The amount of times I told the CA that this will be an issue is a lot. And the amount of time they replied saying there will be no issue is every single time. Dam I hate CAs like Comodo
At least for many web apps the future is likely automatically created and managed domain validated certificates. Amazon and Azure provide these free of charge and then you have Let’s encrypt.
This does not change the CA paradigm, but removes many operational issues.
