this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
362 points (97.9% liked)

Technology

60112 readers
2383 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ADTJ@feddit.uk 1 points 1 week ago

It would be six days at max, assuming they managed to steal the certificate immediately after it was issued, otherwise it's gonna be even less.

Having the certificate doesn't automatically mean you can change the site, if you have control of the site hosting you likely wouldn't need to steal the cert anyway.

Stealing the certificate would allow you to run a man in the middle type attack but that's inevitably going to be very limited in scope. The shorter time limit on the cert reduces that scope even further, which is great.

Since most Let's Encrypt certs will have an automated renewal process this doesn't even really change the overhead of setup so I think this move makes a lot of sense.

There are other things certificates can be used for as well of course but I'm just going off your example.