Amber Neely
Apple places a hard cap of 398 days on certificate validity lengths, hoping to bolster safer, more secure browsing.
Apple has announced that starting on September 1, Safari will reject any website that hosts an HTTPS certificate with more than 398 days of validity. Certificates issued before September 1 will not be subject to the change until the date of their next certificate renewal.
HTTPS certificates are designed to make sure that your connection to a website is safe and secure. If you visit a site with a rejected certificate, you'll see a privacy warning.
For the average user, this shift ensures that you're only interacting with sites that have the latest encryption and security standards. Keeping up with security standards is highly critical for websites that manage the health and financial information of their users.
The announcement took place at the 49th CA/Browser Forum, a voluntary consortium of certification authorities, according to The Next Web.
Certificate authorities routinely would issue certificates that were valid for up to five years but had reduced it to just over two years in 2017.
AppleInsider Staff
Chip Loder
Christine McKee
Malcolm Owen
William Gallagher
Andrew Orr
24 Comments
Alas, Safari is working with less and less web sites, especially important commercial ones ... such that I keep having to fire up Firefox. It's nice that Apple has desires to bolster this and that, but if it breaks the interwebs, it's not much use to anyone.
Seems problematic, if two year certificates are continuing to be issued.
Why make it 13 months instead of 24?
So my websites and apps that use 2 year certificates purchased from Godaddy are going to be rejected by Safari starting in September?
They have completely lost the plot at this company. Obviously some bizarre takeover occurred in the last few years where lawyers are now running software development.