Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

On March 19th, Richard Hicks, one of our customers, emailed us about a certificate that had renewed after only a week. It was a 90-day certificate and he had not initiated the renewal. That’s the kind of thing that sends you straight to the logs. We found the answer right away. The certificate’s ARI renewal window had been shortened dramatically.

When you use CertKit, your private keys live in CertKit’s database, encrypted at rest. We’ve written about why the actual risk is smaller than it sounds. But some organizations have policies that prohibit storing private keys with any third party, regardless of how they’re protected. That policy isn’t going away. The Local Keystore enables those organizations to use CertKit and still keep their keys local.

Certbot is good software in the classic Linux tradition: it does one thing simply and expects you to chain it together with everything else. One server, one certificate, done. The trouble is that most environments are not simple. And the moment yours isn’t, you discover that renewing a certificate and getting it deployed are two different problems, and deployment is your problem.

In July 2024, DigiCert discovered they’d been issuing certificates with improper domain validation for five years. They gave customers 24 hours to replace 83,000 certificates. CISA issued an emergency alert. Critical infrastructure operators couldn’t meet the deadline. Some customers sued. That’s what mass revocation looks like in practice. The CA finds a compliance problem, the clock starts, and everyone scrambles. ACME Renewal Information (ARI) is the fix.

Two new features this week, both pushing in the same direction: make certificate lifetimes someone else’s problem.

On May 21, 2019, LinkedIn’s URL shortener went down. The certificate had expired. Millions of people cried out in terror when they couldn’t click on AI link bait. The interesting part: LinkedIn had renewed the certificate ten days earlier. The renewal succeeded. The certificate just never made it to the server. The renewed cert existed somewhere, but the server still served the old one. Most certificate automation is built to prevent the “I forgot to renew” problem.

We’ve got a boatload of features to show off this week. We knocked out some of the most common requests, user management, single-sign on, and my personal favorite: the weekly email summary.

The bell rings. Last call for 398-day certificates is March 15. After that, every CA is required to cut you off at 200 days. Some have already stopped serving them early. The rest follow in two weeks. The irony of good certificate management is that when it works, nobody notices. No alerts, no outages, no 2am pages. The only time it gets attention is when something expires. Which means the teams doing it well rarely have the budget or the political capital to fix the process before it breaks.