>which includes basically every entity that ships a popular web browser and every entity that ships certificates trusted in those browsers.

So no one that actually has to renew these certificates.

Hey! How long does a root certificate from a certificate authority last?

10 to 25 years?

Why don't those last 120 minutes? They're responsible for the "security" of the whole internet aren't they?

About 99.99% of people and organisations are neither CAs nor Browsers. Hence they have no representation in the CAB Forum.

Hardly 'by definition niche' IMHO.

For better or worse the push down to 47-day certificates is an industry-wide thing, in a few years no provider will issue certificates for longer than that.

Nobody is being forced to use 6-day certs for domains though, when the time comes Let's Encrypt will default to 47 days just like everyone else.

What does attestation mean in this context? The point of the Web PKI is to provide consistent cryptographic identity for online resources, not necessarily trustworthy ones.

(The classic problem with self-signed certs being that TOFU doesn’t scale to millions of users, particularly ones who don’t know what a certificate fingerprint is or what it means when it changes.)

A lot corporate environments load their root cert and MITM you anyway

Then you might as well get rid of TLS altogether.

> broken by some government agency or hacker group

Probably not. For browsers to accept this certificate it has to be logged in a certificate transparency log for anyone to see, and no such certificates have been seen to be logged.

One of the ideas behind short-lived certificates is to put certificate lifetimes within the envelope of CRL efficacy, since CRLs themselves don’t scale well and are a significant source of operational challenges for CAs.

This makes sense from a security perspective, insofar as you agree with the baseline position that revocations should always be honored in a timely manner.

I'm not sure it is about security. For security, CRLs and OCSP were a thing from the beginning. Short-lived certificates allow to cancel CRLs or at least reduce their size, so CA can save some expenses (I guess it's quite a bit of traffic for every client to download CRLs for entire letsencrypt).

My browser on my work laptop has 219 root certificates trusted. Some of those may be installed from my employer, but I suspect most of them come from MS as it's Edge on Windows 11. I see in that list things like "Swedish Government Root Authority" "Thailand National Root Certification Authority" "Staat der Nederlanden Root CA" and things like "MULTICERT Root Certification Authority" "ACCVRAUZ1". I don't think there is any reason to believe any certificate. If a government wants a cert for a given DNS they will get it, either because they directly control a trusted root CA, or because they will present a warrant to a company that wants to do business in their jurisdiction and said company will issue the cert.

TLS certs should be treated much more akin to SSH host keys in the known hosts file. Browsers should record the cert the first time they see it and then warn me if it changes before it's expiration date, or some time near the expiration date.