On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 3:52 PM Peter Gutmann <[email protected]>
wrote:

> It would be helpful if browsers enforced the upper limits in the same way
> they
> strictly enforce lower limits.  I don't know how many root CA certs I've
> seen
> with validity periods of between one and two hundred years (that's not a
> typo).  In particular, one-century validity periods seem to be popular for
> we-
> don't-want-to-have-to-replace-them CA certs.  So once they're entered into
> the
> CA store those all-powerful certs will still be valid long after the CAs
> have
> gone out of business, the private keys have been sold or stolen or lost,
> and
> the crypto they use has been broken.
>

Hi Peter,

Can you say more about this?  Are you concerned that people are not getting
updates to their trust anchors?  My understanding is that - assuming that
updates are active - trust anchors are only retained if the CA continues to
pass audits and so forth.  (Seo said something similar.)

Put another way, while an end date is a useful construct, does it need to
be the date in the certificate?

Maybe the trust store could indicate the date range over which trust
remains valid.  That might be the date at which the current audit remains
valid (or whatever time the trust assessment might need to be
re-assessed).  Updates to the trust store could extend the lifetime of
validity without changing the certificate anywhere.

If that is how it worked, what does it matter if the certificate claims to
be valid until 2598?

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