3 ms·

Browsers did the same thing with Certificate Transparency earlier, unnoticed to many.

tialaramex 7y ago
And this is like that in an important way, for now. Chrome and Safari both have browsers which implement a check such that you need to present enough "qualified" SCTs or the certificate is treated as invalid. The easiest way to pass that check (for certificates you're going to sell or give to webmasters with no clue) is to log a pre-certificate with Google, and with at least one (preferably two) other logs that Apple and Google agree are trustworthy - then bake the SCTs you get back from those logs into the X.509 certificate you're issuing. But these are not Trust Store policy requirements. If you in fact choose to issue (for a number of reasons some CAs do) without logging that's still permitted, the certificates just won't be trusted in Chrome or Safari. You obviously won't get far selling certificates that don't work out of the box in Chrome or Safari to the average punter, but not every customer is the average punter. Apple's declared intention is that Safari will not trust long-lived certificates. But as far as I've seen it is not specified that they would consider a CA which chooses to issue such certificates to violate Apple trust store policy and pursue any sanction or demand revocation. The certificate just doesn't work in Safari. Now, today Mozilla's Firefox is in a different situation from Safari and Chrome as I mentioned elsewhere. Firefox doesn't do a lot of technical enforcement. Mozilla works hard (and in public where we can all see) on policy decisions, but most of them are not enforced in its flagship browser product. Mozilla champions CT logging for example, but a brand new certificate presented with no SCTs works fine in Firefox even though it'd be rejected by Safari and Chrome. Today Firefox doesn't require 825 day lifetime limits, even though those are the limits set in policy, and so following Apple's suggestion wouldn't actually be easy for them, there isn't a line of code (as there is in Chrome for example) that multiples 825 * 86400 = maximum lifetime in seconds, which can be adjusted to say 398 or some other number of days instead of 825.

And this is like that in an important way, for now. Chrome and Safari both have browsers which implement a check such that you need to present enough "qualified" SCTs or the certificate is treated as invalid. The easiest way to pass that check (for certificates you're going to sell or give to webmasters with no clue) is to log a pre-certificate with Google, and with at least one (preferably two) other logs that Apple and Google agree are trustworthy - then bake the SCTs you get back from those logs into the X.509 certificate you're issuing. But these are not Trust Store policy requirements. If you in fact choose to issue (for a number of reasons some CAs do) without logging that's still permitted, the certificates just won't be trusted in Chrome or Safari. You obviously won't get far selling certificates that don't work out of the box in Chrome or Safari to the average punter, but not every customer is the average punter. Apple's declared intention is that Safari will not trust long-lived certificates. But as far as I've seen it is not specified that they would consider a CA which chooses to issue such certificates to violate Apple trust store policy and pursue any sanction or demand revocation. The certificate just doesn't work in Safari. Now, today Mozilla's Firefox is in a different situation from Safari and Chrome as I mentioned elsewhere. Firefox doesn't do a lot of technical enforcement. Mozilla works hard (and in public where we can all see) on policy decisions, but most of them are not enforced in its flagship browser product. Mozilla champions CT logging for example, but a brand new certificate presented with no SCTs works fine in Firefox even though it'd be rejected by Safari and Chrome. Today Firefox doesn't require 825 day lifetime limits, even though those are the limits set in policy, and so following Apple's suggestion wouldn't actually be easy for them, there isn't a line of code (as there is in Chrome for example) that multiples 825 * 86400 = maximum lifetime in seconds, which can be adjusted to say 398 or some other number of days instead of 825.