The most-aggressively short timelines don't apply until 2029. Regardless, now is the time to get serious about automation. That is going to require vendors of a lot of off-the-shelf products to come up with better (or any) automation integrations for existing cert management systems or whatever the new standard becomes.

The current workflow many big orgs use is something like:

1. Poor bastard application engineer/support guy is forced to keep a spreadsheet for all the machines and URLs he "owns" and set 30-day reminders when they will expire,

2. manually generate CSRs,

3. reach out to some internal or 3rd party group who may ignore his request or fuck it up twice before giving him correct signed certs,

4. schedule and get approval for one or more "possible brief outage" maintenance windows because the software requires manually rebinding the new certs in some archaic way involving handjamming each cert into a web interface on a separate Windows box.

As the validity period shrinks and the number of environments the average production application uses grows, the concept of doing these processes manually becomes a total clusterfuck.

My concern is basically that this forces people to use very expensive cert providers, since it is infeasible to setup and connect and secure an HSM that can do this yourself. And Microsoft and Amazon have tricked the browser forums that their online ones are good enough.

It essentially puts yet another monopoly into the “open” Web. The CA browser forum is a joke at this point and I don’t respect any of the decision in the last 10 years. They all serve to further centralize and close off the web.

People keep bringing up LetsEncrypt, but it very much cannot issue EV carts. It costs THOUSANDS of dollars to use a service that can auto renew “trusted certs”.

I just hope that automation doesn't bring new vulnerabilities... Otherwise we get safer cert but poorly secured automated PKI to create the certs?

I mean if you have a fully automated cert deployment it could be months with a compromised system and you probably wouldn't see it.

I don't know how effective this will be. It still seems short even if it starts in 2029.

Get ready for a bunch more 1 and 2 day outages because someone forgot/missed the deadline to renew some crusty server somewhere. This is such massive overkill for most servers. End users should start getting used to that expired certificate warning in their browser of choice and the process to tell it to continue to the site anyway.

Can we stop doing certs now?

Can we stop letting google decide what is and isn't acceptable on the internet based on who gave them money?

I think there's an argument to be made here of why are we trusting certificate providers anyway since that just adds another layer of centralization and a choke point for governments to attack. Why not use self-signed certificates and have each search engine indexer also index the certificate and point out how long it has been since it has changed so that you can trust whatever search engine you wish instead of these mega centralized providers of certificates. If kagi, google, ddg, and quant (for example) are all in agreement about the validity of a cert i feel its likely trustworthy. If they start disagreeing thats when it may be time to DYOR. Besides, TOFU is much easier to set up.