The government expires your driver's license because they want to charge you for a renewal. You can tell that this is the only reason because it's the only thing they want in order to give you a new one. They do nothing to confirm that you still know how to drive.
But Let's Encrypt doesn't charge anything. All they want is to confirm that you still control the domain. So why doesn't "the DNS record they had you add to begin with is still there" satisfy that requirement and allow you to repeatedly renew the certificate until it stops being there?
Tie the DNS challenge to the public key in the certificate. Then as long as it hasn't changed you can update the certificate without giving the update process modify access to the DNS server.
Most governments primarily don’t want stolen identity documents circulating without any time bounds, especially given that they often get used improperly these days (e.g. by allowing a photo/scan of somebody’s ID to constitute “authentication” without comparing the photo to a real person, which is a bizarre notion that’s getting more and more common).
Passports and license renewals are often for periods in the nature of 10 years. Is that meaningfully different from the self-invalidation already implied by an ID that claims you're 144 years old? The mean time between mass data breaches is certainly already less than the existing renewal interval.
Meanwhile how does a stolen scan of an identity document become invalidated by requiring a renewal? The new document is identical and even contains the same ID number. The only difference is the date which anyone could trivially alter with a computer. For that matter the only thing they need from the stolen ID is the name and number, so even if you completely redesign the layout of the ID, someone with the old one can recreate a scan of the new layout using only the information on the old stolen one.
The problem here is not that you need IDs to expire, it's that you need fools to stop trying to rely on a computer image of an ID to authenticate anything.
> The new document is identical and even contains the same ID number.
Quite a few IDs contain a 2D barcode, and I believe at least some of these contain some offline-validateable signature over the basic data of the document, including the expiry date. That's not as trivial to forge.
On top of that, document expiry does help a bit with people trying to use a lost/stolen ID of somebody they happen to look similar to, adds a forcing function to make people eventually upgrade to newer/more secure document standards etc.
> Quite a few IDs contain a 2D barcode, and I believe at least some of these contain some offline-validateable signature over the basic data of the document, including the expiry date. That's not as trivial to forge.
Most government IDs don't have that, and it's still not clear what good it would be doing when data breaches happen on much shorter timescales than ID expirations. Who cares if they stop being able to use the ID after 10 years, when they can use them for 10 years and there will be another breach providing them with a new batch of IDs to use in a matter of days rather than years?
> On top of that, document expiry does help a bit with people trying to use a lost/stolen ID of somebody they happen to look similar to
That seems like an extremely narrow advantage. If they just need some ID that looks like them then they can just get another one from the batch of fresh ones. If they need the ID of a specific person, the government still isn't authenticating renewals, so wouldn't they just use the existing stolen ID and pay for a renewal in that case, in which case we're back the only thing happening being the government extracts money?
Or no, in that case it's worse, because then they can submit a fresh picture of themselves to renew the ID which has someone else's name on it.
> adds a forcing function to make people eventually upgrade to newer/more secure document standards etc.
Which you already have because everybody eventually dies.
Regarding "the DNS record they had you add to begin with is still there", it generally isn't. Part of the automation process for certbot using the DNS-01 challenge is the removal of the DNS record, following successful validation of said record. In any complex DNS environment, leaving TXT records around just increases the debris.
It's the Let's Encrypt people who make certbot, so that's just an implementation detail, and the premise here anyway is that you would be doing it manually (once) because the inconvenience to be avoided is when certbot can't update the DNS records automatically.
No, it's not the LetsEncrypt people who make certbot. Certbot is an EFF project, managed by separate people. Additionally, most of the DNS implementations will require the use of a specific plug-in/library for your selected DNS platform, and those, also, are developed separately.
Let's Encrypt was an EFF project to begin with. They're still the same people.
The DNS plugins only matter if you're trying to automate updating the DNS entry. The whole point is that you could have certbot spit out a DNS TXT record for the user to manually add to their DNS once, e.g. which contains the public key fingerprint of the certificate they want Let's Encrypt to renew on an ongoing basis, and then certbot would be able to renew the certificate as long as the DNS record remains in place.
No, LetsEncrypt was not an EFF project to begin with. Look, it works how it's documented to work. If you wish it worked some other way, to solve your particular suggested workflow, you're likely free to fork it and make it work that way.
But Let's Encrypt doesn't charge anything. All they want is to confirm that you still control the domain. So why doesn't "the DNS record they had you add to begin with is still there" satisfy that requirement and allow you to repeatedly renew the certificate until it stops being there?
Tie the DNS challenge to the public key in the certificate. Then as long as it hasn't changed you can update the certificate without giving the update process modify access to the DNS server.