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1318 points xvector | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.408s | source
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needle0 ◴[] No.19823806[source]
I’ll still keep using Firefox since I recognize the importance of browser diversity and the hazards of a Chrome monoculture (that and vertical tabs), but, yikes.

Still, this type of oversight seems all too common even in large companies. I remember several cases from Fortune 500 companies in the past few years alone. What would be a good way to automate checking for them? Has anyone developed a tool designed specifically to avoid certificate expiry disasters?

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kam ◴[] No.19823861[source]
ACME / Let's Encrypt go in the direction of making expiry happen so often that renewal gets automated, rather than a being a rare manual process that can be forgotten about.

Not sure that's viable for a signing certificate like this, but that's the way to solve it for the web PKI.

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SomeHacker44 ◴[] No.19824049[source]
This is just abusive to the vast majority of users who do not care but still want to use SSL for their servers, frankly. I should be allowed to choose a near unlimited lifetime for my server's certificate if I don't care about the risks that may present.
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1. MrStonedOne ◴[] No.19824499[source]
It's not your risk to decide on. You will not always own that domain name, and allowing you to still have a valid cert for it afterwards is silly.
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2. pmontra ◴[] No.19825298[source]
Actually it could be not negligence but a way to perform an attack.

Register a domain, get a certificate lasting forever, let the domain expire and somebody buy it. Then somehow redirect all or part of the traffic to that domain to your own server with a valid certificate. Chances are that few people will notice something has changed in the details of the certificate.

However you'll have left traces all over the place: credit cards, phone numbers, etc.