this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025
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There is an arguably much worse security issue which could potentially be caused by this change: If users become more likely to encounter expired certificate warnings, then they are more likely to have to click through those warnings and develop warning-fatigue, making them more vulnerable to accepting invalid certificates during an actual attack on their system.
It will be interesting to see whether CAs are capable of increasing their capacity by the 10x necessary just to serve the same number of customers. Presumably they will need to raise prices to accomplish this. Outages with certificate renewal systems will be almost inevitable - it's only a question of how frequently we see it.
Letsencrypt already renews all of their certificates every 60 days. Not much will change for the largest CA.
And as most admins are getting used to free certificates, paying for certs will become even less a thing.
They're already also offering 6-day certs, so capacity isn't a problem.
Let's see what the reduced funding from US gov will do.
This isn't an overnight change, we have 3 years until the 47 day certificates go into effect.
In terms of increasing their capacity by the 10x, having shorter certificate lifetimes means that CAs will have a shorter list of valid but revoked certificates, and also will have way less of valid certificates in the certificate transparency logs. These are checked constantly, so the reduced size means less costs serving this information.
CAs are already charging an arm and a leg for very little work of signing the certificates. Doing domain validation is an automated process, so unless the need is for OV certificates (which doesn't differentiate you anymore in modern browsers), CAs won't need to hire more people for issuing certificates. With Let's Encrypt being a free option that supports ACME, if CAs use this change as a cash grab, they'll probably see clients move away rather than put up with the outrageous costs.