Wandering Thoughts archives

2024-02-18

Even big websites may still be manually managing TLS certificates (or close)

I've written before about how people's soon to expire TLS certificates aren't necessarily a problem, because not everyone manages their TLS certificates through Let's Encrypt like '30 day in advance automated renewal' and perhaps short-lived TLS certificates. For example, some places (like Facebook) have automation but seem to only deploy TLS certificates that are quite close to expiry. Other places at least look as if they're still doing things by hand, and recently I got to watch an example of that.

As I mentioned yesterday, the department outsources its public website to a SaaS CMS provider. While the website has a name here for obvious reasons, it uses various assets that are hosted on sites under the SaaS provider's domain names (both assets that are probably general and assets, like images, that are definitely specific to us). For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, we monitor the reachability of these additional domain names with our metrics system. This only checks on-campus reachability, of course, but that's still important even if most visitors to the site are probably from outside the university.

As a side effect of this reachability monitoring, we harvest the TLS certificate expiry times of these domains, and because we haven't done anything special about it, they get show on our core status dashboard along side the expiry times of TLS certificates that we're actually responsible for. The result of this was that recently I got to watch their TLS expiry times count down to only two weeks away, which is lots of time from one view while also alarmingly little if you're used to renewals 30 days in advance. Then they flipped over to new a new year-long TLS certificate and our dashboard was quiet again (except for the next such external site that has dropped under 30 days).

Interestingly, the current TLS certificate was issued about a week before it was deployed, or at least its Not-Before date is February 9th at 00:00 UTC and it seems to have been put into use this past Friday, the 16th. One reason for this delay in deployment is suggested by our monitoring, which seems to have detected traces of a third certificate sometimes being visible, this one expiring June 23rd, 2024. Perhaps there were some deployment challenges across the SaaS provider's fleet of web servers.

(Their current TLS certificate is actually good for just a bit over a year, with a Not-Before of 2024-02-09 and a Not-After of 2025-02-28. This is presumably accepted by browsers, even though it's bit over 365 days; I haven't paid attention to the latest restrictions from places like Apple.)

web/TLSCertsSomeStillManual written at 22:06:08;


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