Question

Let's Encrypt ACME TLS-SNI-01 end of life

Posted on January 18, 2019
Let's Encrypt Ubuntu
Asked by nilssonvik

I received this email today and wanted to know what I should do, server wise.

Hello,

Action is required to prevent your Let’s Encrypt certificate renewals from breaking.

Your Let’s Encrypt client used ACME TLS-SNI-01 domain validation to issue a certificate in the past 60 days.

TLS-SNI-01 validation is reaching end-of-life and will stop working on February 13th, 2019.

You need to update your ACME client to use an alternative validation method (HTTP-01, DNS-01 or TLS-ALPN-01) before this date or your certificate renewals will break and existing certificates will start to expire.

If you need help updating your ACME client, please open a new topic in the Help category of the Let’s Encrypt community forum:

https://community.letsencrypt.org/c/help

Please answer all of the questions in the topic template so we can help you.

For more information about the TLS-SNI-01 end-of-life please see our API announcement:

https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/february-13-2019-end-of-life-for-all-tls-sni-01-validation-support/74209

Thank you, Let’s Encrypt Staff

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Amin Akbari • January 18, 2019

Accepted Answer

I believe you do not have to do anything if you are using “python-certbot-apache” package to automatically renew the certificates. Do the following in order to see if it uses “tls-sni-01” or “http-01” to renew your certificates. If it uses “http-01” you are all fine.

$ sudo certbot renew --dry-run

If the dry run is successful, you do not have to do anything. If not, just update your packages and it would probably use “http-01” to update your certificates automatically.

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get upgrade

After executing the above, run the dry run again to see if it works correctly.

marek01 • March 13, 2019

I had the same issue, updating and messing up with config file did not work for me. All I needed to do is update my certbot as outlined in https://certbot.eff.org/lets-encrypt/ubuntutrusty-apache I just run the following commands:

$ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common $ sudo add-apt-repository universe $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install certbot python-certbot-apache

and skipped the Installing DNS plugins part as I was afraid it would mess up my configuration.

After that, I removed any explicit references to tls-sni-01 in my renewal configuration using:

sudo sh -c “sed -i.bak -e ‘s/^(pref_challs.)tls-sni-01(.)/\1http-01\2/g’ /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/; rm -f /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/.bak”

as explained here:

https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/how-to-stop-using-tls-sni-01-with-certbot/83210

Run sudo certbot renew --dry-run

and it worked like charm.

It took me a couple of hours of searching for the right solution and once I found it 5 min to fix it Hope that it’ll save someone some time. Cheers!

Ajay Thakur • January 31, 2019

I got an error that is Attempting to renew cert (www.mysite.com) from /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/www.mysite.com.conf produced an unexpected error: Problem binding to port 80: Could not bind to IPv4 or IPv6… Skipping. All renewal attempts failed. The following certs could not be renewed: /etc/letsencrypt/live/www.mysite.com/fullchain.pem (failure). what should I do?